HILLARY AND TRUMP NOW NECK AND NECK
Email scandal wipes out Clinton’s 12-point lead
THE race for the White House was thrown wide open last night as Hillary Clinton’s poll lead slipped to a single point. Her campaign was rocked by claims that the FBI was sorting through 650,000 emails found on a laptop used by a top aide. The process is expected to take weeks, meaning the probe into her use of a private email server could be hanging over Mrs Clinton when Americans vote next Tuesday.
The FBI’s decision to reopen the investigation has helped fuel a fightback by a resurgent Donald Trump. A dramatic poll for ABC News and the Washington Post found he has cut Mrs Clinton’s lead from 12 points to just one.
And while six in ten voters say the FBI’s announcement on Friday will not affect their voting, more than three in ten said it had made them
less likely to support her. In an election they were confidently expecting to win, the Clinton campaign was forced on the defensive yesterday.
The Democrats complained that FBI director James Comey’s intervention was unprecedented. And they repeated Mrs Clinton’s call for him to provide more information about the content of the emails he had discovered.
In private, Clinton insiders are muttering about a possible conspiracy by the law enforcement community to hamstring their candidate’s election hopes.
The Trump campaign, floundering for days under a stream of allegations about his sexual mistreatment of women, has seized on the FBI announcement as a godsend. Republican campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said that Mr Comey’s deci- sion showed that Mrs Clinton was ‘unfit to be president based on her constant flouting of the law’.
Investigators told the Wall Street Journal that several thousand of the emails on the laptop, used by both aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, the disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, were sent to, or from, Mrs Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State.
In July, Mr Comey declined to recommend charges against Mrs Clinton but strenuously condemned her ‘extreme carelessness’ in using a private, underprotected private email server that could easily be hacked by hostile governments or individuals.
Last night, a New York Times poll showed Mr Trump had a 4 percentage point lead in Florida – the key battleground state in which he had trailed Mrs Clinton by a single point just a month ago.
The emails came to light after the FBI reviewed Mr Weiner’s email in connection with allegations he had exchanged explicit messages with a child. It thought that Miss Abedin used the shared computer to exchange messages using Mrs Clinton’s private server. Mr Weiner resigned as a Republican congressman after a series of sexting scandals.
The Wall Street Journal last night presented the most detailed account yet of how the latest investigation had developed, citing unnamed figures ‘familiar with the matter’. The newspaper reported that FBI agents would have to inspect some 650,000 emails to determine how many are relevant to Clinton.
The sources said the investigation would take ‘weeks at a minimum’.
Mr Trump has only commanded a lead once before – in late July – according to the RealClearPolitics poll of polls.
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta poured scorn on the FBI move. He called it ‘an unprecedented action’ which was ‘long on innuendo’ and ‘ short on facts,’ and insisted it suggested ‘no evidence of wrongdoing’.
He and other Clinton officials cited reports that the FBI’s bosses at the US Justice Department had warned Mr Comey against going public.