Both candidates are terrible but Clinton's competence makes her dangerous - while Trump is a fool who will accomplish nothing

Yated by Jonathan Rosenblum

A case can be made for each of the candidates. It consists of three words: What’s the alternative? It is no exaggeration to describe Donald Trump as the most poorly prepared man to run for the White House, clueless about the nature of the office and lacking minimal knowledge of any of the issues he would face as president. He is too contemptuous of the office he seeks and the country he would lead to even attempt to remedy either of these failings.

For good measure, he is infantile, distracted from the issue at hand by any perceived slight, a whiny spoiled brat, and a man of low character who lies about his charitable giving (and almost everything else) and about whom a positive word dare not be said lest we convey to our children the idea that moral character does not matter.

And her? The rap sheet is too long to review. Never in the history of the Republic has any high office holder sought to monetize political power on the scale of she and her husband. Stealing the White House furniture when they left the White House and selling pardons in the last days of Bill’s presidency are the perfect metaphors that came before and after.

As president, Clinton’s chief constitutional duty would be faithfully executing the laws of the United States. How can she take an oath to do so, when she has consistently shown that she does not view those laws as applying to herself or her husband? Andrew McCarthy, chief prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing case, was not joking when he wrote that Hillary should be prosecuted under the federal racketeering statutes (RICO) for the manner in which she turned the State Department into an adjunct of the influence peddling operation of the Clinton Foundation.

The intertwined tentacles of the Clinton Foundation, Teneo Consulting, and the State Department bear all the markers of a criminal enterprise. Thanks to WikiLeaks and Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act requests, we now are privy to a raft of email requests for favors from Douglas Band of the Clinton Foundation to senior State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin. Under special dispensation, Abedin was allowed to be simultaneously employed by Teneo Consulting, co-founded by Band, and the State Department. And Mills also took a job with the Clinton Foundation after leaving her job as senior counselor to Secretary of State Clinton.

Perhaps the most egregious State Department intervention on behalf of a major donor to the Clinton Foundation was that benefitting Frant Giustra. In 2005, Bill Clinton lobbied Kazakhstan’s ruling despot to grant uranium mining rights to Giustra’s mining company. Shortly thereafter, Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Foundation and pledged another $100 million.

When that same despot subsequently arrested the director of the state-controlled uranium agency, the State Department energy envoy pressed the Kazakhstan government to recognize the previously issued licenses to Giustra’s company. Subsequently, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation sought to purchase control of Giustra’s company and thereby gain control of one-fifth of the known uranium reserves. That required approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It was granted.

In 2011, Chelsea Clinton grew so concerned about the way the Clinton Foundation was being run that she commissioned an independent investigation by the law firm of Simpson, Thatcher and Bartlett, headed by Victoria Bjorklund, considered one of the leading national experts in the laws governing foundations and charities. The resulting report was scathing, and included a finding that many large donors expected “a quid quo pro” for their contributions, something that is bright-line illegal. The report further found that the Foundation consistently ignored all standard best practices for foundation good governance.

In a 12-page memorandum included in the report, Douglas Band described how his firm, Teneo Consulting, directed major corporate donors to the Clinton Foundation and otherwise benefitted what he dubbed “Bill Clinton Inc.” during the period Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Not only did the Foundation, which employees many long-time veterans of Clinton campaigns and provides luxury travel to Clinton Family members, gain multi-million dollar contributions, but former President Clinton was paid enormous speaking and other fees. One of those perks was an over $17 million dollar contract for serving as “honorary chairman” of a for-profit university. In the memo, Band boasted that he had worked out contracts with clients who donated to the Clinton Foundation that would personally pay the former president $66 million over the next decade.[...]

SO BOTH CANDIDATES are thoroughly unsuited to be president – like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each in his or her own way. I could respect someone who decides to vote for Hillary out of fear that Trump’s ignorance of foreign affairs and the vanity that makes it impossible to acknowledge that ignorance makes him too dangerous. And I could respect someone who chooses Trump because he will be more supportive of Israel, hopefully appoint better Supreme Court justices, might rely heavily on vice-president Mike Pence, and will not further advance the identity politics destroying America and make it impossible to address urgent problems – in short, because he is not Hillary. And I can respect someone who will not be complicit in either one becoming president and refuses to vote for one or another. [...]

Donald Trump, it must be admitted, exhibits a lot of worrisome authoritarian traits. He has advocated a loosening of American libel laws, speaks admiringly of “strong man” Putin, and seems to believe the president has unlimited powers.

His virtue, however, is that he would be incompetent in acting as president on those tendencies. He doesn’t know where the levers of anti-democratic power lie nor would he have access to them. And his own party would stifle his exercise of executive power at every turn.

Not so Hillary. She knows where the levers are and how to use them. That is the function of a modern Yale Law School education: Learn how to use power in ways that the cretins of the world cannot stop you, even if they happen to be the majority.[...]

Krauthammer explains why he can not vote for Clinton or Trump

Washington Post

The case against Hillary Clinton could have been written before the recent WikiLeaks and FBI disclosures. But these documents do provide hard textual backup.

The most sensational disclosure was the proposed deal between the State Department and the FBI in which the FBI would declassify a Clinton email and State would give the FBI more slots in overseas stations. What made it sensational was the rare appearance in an official account of the phrase “quid pro quo,” which is the currently agreed-upon dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable corruption.

This is nonetheless an odd choice for most egregious offense. First, it occurred several layers removed from the campaign and from Clinton. It involved a career State Department official (he occupied the same position under Condoleezza Rice) covering not just for Clinton but for his own department.

Second, it’s not clear which side originally offered the bargain. Third, nothing tangible was supposed to exchange hands. There was no proposed personal enrichment — a Rolex in return for your soul — which tends to be our standard for punishable misconduct.

And finally, it never actually happened. The FBI turned down the declassification request.

In sum, a warm gun but nonsmoking. Indeed, if the phrase “quid pro quo” hadn’t appeared, it would have received little attention. Moreover, it obscures the real scandal — the bottomless cynicism of the campaign and of the candidate.

Among dozens of examples, the Qatari gambit. Qatar, one of the worst actors in the Middle East (having financially supported the Islamic State, for example), offered $1 million as a “birthday” gift to Bill Clinton in return for five minutes of his time. Who offers — who takes — $200,000 a minute? We don’t know the “quid” here, but it’s got to be big.

In the final debate, Hillary Clinton ran and hid when asked about pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation. And for good reason. The emails reveal how foundation donors were first in line for favors and contracts.[...]

Of course, we knew all this. But we hadn’t seen it so clearly laid out. Illicit and illegal as is WikiLeaks, it is the camera in the sausage factory. And what it reveals is surpassingly unpretty.

I didn’t need the Wiki files to oppose Hillary Clinton. As a conservative, I have long disagreed with her worldview and the policies that flow from it. As for character, I have watched her long enough to find her deeply flawed, to the point of unfitness. But for those heretofore unpersuaded, the recent disclosures should close the case.

A case so strong that, against any of a dozen possible GOP candidates, voting for her opponent would be a no-brainer. Against Donald Trump, however, it’s a dilemma. I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. But, as I’ve explained in these columns, I could never vote for Donald Trump.

The only question is whose name I’m going to write in. With Albert Schweitzer doubly unavailable (noncitizen, dead), I’m down to Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse. Two weeks to decide.

The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

The Atlantic

Why support a candidate who rejects your preferences and offends your opinions? Don’t do it for her—do it for the republic, and the Constitution.

If the polls are correct, many disaffected Republicans are making their peace with Donald Trump in the final hours of the 2016 campaign. The usual term for this process is “returning home.” This time, we need a new phrase. The familiar Republican home has been bulldozed and replaced by a Trump-branded edifice. It will require long and hard work to restore and rebuild what has been lost.

Between now and then, however, there is a ballot to face. Last week, I advanced the best case I could for each of the available options. Now, however, comes the time for choosing—and for explicating the reasons for that choice.

Those attempting to rally reluctant Republicans to Trump seldom waste words on the affirmative case for the blowhard businessman. What is there to say in favor of a candidate who would lie even about his (non) support for a charity for children with AIDS?

Instead, the case for Trump swiftly shifts to a fervid case against Hillary Clinton. Here for example are some lines from an op-ed coauthored by Bill Bennett, a high conservative eminence and former secretary of education, and F.H. Buckley, a law professor, Trump supporter, and sometime speechwriter.[...]

The conclusion that follows from such sizzling philippics is that anybody, literally anybody, wearing an “R” by his name should be preferred to the demonic Clinton. “Everybody on this stage is better than Hillary Clinton,” argued former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the sixth Republican debate, January 2016. Bush surely did not believe that, but in the moment, it must have seemed a forgivable fib. Hillary Clinton would have paid a similar compliment to Bernie Sanders on a Democratic debate stage, but who doubts that privately she would have preferred Jeb Bush to the cranky Vermont socialist?

Demonology aside, most conservatives and Republicans—and yes, many non-conservatives and non-Republicans—will recognize many of the factual predicates of the critiques of Hillary Clinton’s methods and character. The Clintons sold access to a present secretary of state and a potential future president in pursuit of personal wealth. Hillary Clinton does indeed seem a suspicious and vindictive personality. For sure, a President Clinton will want to spend and regulate even more than the Obama administration has done.

Like Henny Youngman, however, the voter must always ask: compared to what?

One of only two people on earth will win the American presidency on November 8. Hillary Clinton is one of those two possibilities. Donald Trump is the only other.

Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated?

Should I be so appalled by the Clinton family’s access-selling that I prefer instead a president who boasts of a lifetime of bribing politicians to further his business career? Who defaults on debts and contracts as an ordinary business method, and who avoids taxes by deducting the losses he inflicted on others as if he had suffered them himself? Who cheated the illegal laborers he employed at Trump Tower out of their humble hourly wage? Who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bank of China? Who refuses to disclose his tax returns, perhaps to conceal his business dealings with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle?

To demonstrate my distaste for people whose bodies contain mean bones, it’s proposed that I give my franchise to a man who boasts of his delight in sexual assault? Who mocks the disabled, who denounces immigrant parents whose son laid down his life for this country, who endorses religious bigotry, and who denies the Americanism of everyone from the judge hearing the fraud case against Trump University to the 44th president of the United States?

I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined) and instead empower a bizarre new online coalition of antisemites, misogyists, cranks, and conspiracists with allegedly ominous connections to Russian state spy agencies?

Is this real life?

To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure.

I more or less agree with Trump on his signature issue, immigration. Two years ago, I would have rated immigration as one of the very most important issues in this election. But that was before Trump expanded the debate to include such questions as: “Should America honor its NATO commitments?” “Are American elections real or fake?” “Is it OK for a president to use the office to promote his family business?” “Are handicapped people comical?”

If we arrive at the bizarre endpoint where such seemingly closed questions are open to debate, partisan rancor has overwhelmed and overpowered the reasoning functions of our brains. America's first president cautioned his posterity against succumbing to such internecine hatreds: “The spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” George Washington’s farewell warning resounds with reverberating relevance in this election year.

We don’t have to analogize Donald Trump to any of the lurid tyrants of world history to recognize in him the most anti-constitutional personality ever to gain a major-party nomination for the U.S. presidency. I cannot predict whether Trump would succeed in elevating himself “on the ruins of public liberty.” The outcome would greatly depend on the resolve, integrity, and courage of other leaders and other institutions, especially the Republican leaders in Congress. To date, their record has not been reassuring, but who knows: Maybe they would discover more courage and independence after they bestowed the awesome powers of the presidency than they did while Trump was merely a party nominee. Or maybe not.

What we should all foresee is that a President Trump will certainly try to realize Washington’s nightmare. He must not be allowed to try.

That Donald Trump has approached so near the White House is a bitter reproach to everybody who had the power to stop him. I include myself in this reproach. Early on, I welcomed Trump’s up-ending of some outdated Republican Party dogmas—taking it for granted that of course such a ridiculous and obnoxious fraud could never win a major party’s nomination. But Trump did win. Now, he stands within a percentage point or two or at most four of the presidency of the United States.

Having failed to act promptly at the outset, it’s all the more important to act decisively before it’s too late. The lesson Trump has taught is not only that certain Republican dogmas have passed out of date, but that American democracy itself is much more vulnerable than anyone would have believed only 24 months ago. Incredibly, a country that—through wars and depression—so magnificently resisted the authoritarian temptations of the mid-20th century has half-yielded to a more farcical version of that same threat without any of the same excuse. The hungry and houseless Americans of the Great Depression sustained a constitutional republic. How shameful that the Americans of today—so vastly better off in so many ways, despite their undoubted problems—have done so much less well.

I have no illusions about Hillary Clinton. I expect policies that will seem to me at best counter-productive, at worst actively harmful. America needs more private-market competition in healthcare, not less; lighter regulation of enterprise, not heavier; reduced immigration, not expanded; lower taxes, not higher. On almost every domestic issue, I stand on one side; she stands on the other. I do not imagine that she will meet me, or those who think like me, anywhere within a country mile of half-way.

But she is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She will not outright defy legality altogether. Above all, she can govern herself; the first indispensable qualification for governing others.

So I will vote for the candidate who rejects my preferences and offends my opinions. (In fact, I already have voted for her.) Previous generations accepted infinitely heavier sacrifices and more dangerous duties to defend democracy. I’ll miss the tax cut I’d get from united Republican government. But there will be other elections, other chances to vote for what I regard as more sensible policies. My party will recover to counter her agenda in Congress, moderate her nominations to the courts, and defeat her bid for re-election in 2020. I look forward to supporting Republican recovery and renewal.[...]

Trump expects - despite declaring the election to be rigged - to win in a landslide

Washington Post

It has always been possible that Donald Trump could become president, in the abstract sense. There are a slew of reasons that the map and the electorate were stacked against him regardless of his campaign, of course, but the past few months of polling seem mostly to have been about determining the margin of his defeat rather than his odds of winning. For Trump to win, an awful lot would have to go right.

On Wednesday, a lot did.

At the national level, the race has followed a broad pattern: a big lead for Hillary Clinton that narrows to a tie and then balloons back out. To some extent, the question was where in that cycle we’d land Nov. 8 — a giant Clinton blowout or a narrow fight to the finish. Recent national polls have suggested the latter, that on Election Day the race would be close.

That the race is tightening appears to be largely because of wavering Republicans deciding they could back Trump after all.

A narrowing national race means necessarily that the race is tightening in battleground states, too. As of this moment, Clinton leads in four of the 10 closest battleground states and Trump leads in six, according to RealClearPolitics averages. It’s enough, if we apply those averages to the electoral college, to bring Trump within eight electoral votes of Clinton.[...]

Kaminetsky:Greenblatt Heter: Parameters for retroactive annulment of marriage and why Rav Greenblatt had no justification for giving Heter

  Rav Chaim Dovid Weiss: 

Republicans Better Off Losing by Landslide, George Will Says

ABC News

George Will, a Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative journalist who ripped up his Republican card this year after Donald Trump's nomination, says a narrow GOP defeat would be "the worst conceivable outcome" for the party.

FBI Director James Comey's announcement of the discovery of possibly new Hillary Clinton emails last Friday appears to have shaken up national polls, narrowing the gap between the two candidates. But Will said a narrow defeat would fuel "the old stab-in-the-back theory," with party members blaming Trump dissenters like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse for dividing Republicans.

Will, a columnist for The Washington Post, argued that a landslide win for Clinton would help Republicans by giving the party room to distance itself from divisive candidates and from the "indignation industry," as he dubbed it, of talk radio and cable personalities.

Speaking to ABC News' Jonathan Karl and Rick Klein on the "Powerhouse Politics" podcast today, Will said he was doubtful of a Republican win, barring fundamental changes in the party, starting with how Republican radio and talk show hosts speak about certain issues and groups.

"Until the Republican Party gets right with minorities in this country," Will said, "it's never going to win another presidential election."

He said, "The party has to look at its nominating process. It must never again have debates with 12 people onstage at a time."

"I don't know what you do to erect a kind of filter to keep a certain kind of candidate off the stage, but they have to work on their nominating process," he added.

Known for referring to baseball in his columns, Will said of the 23 percent chance that FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver estimates both Trump and the Chicago Cubs have of winning this year, "I think he's underestimating the Cubs and overestimating Donald Trump."

Will said Comey's announcement about the review of possibly new Clinton emails was reckless, arguing that he broke FBI protocol for the wrong reasons.

"He sends this letter to Congress, saying emails of unknown content and unknown prominence might be 'pertinent' — that's a word to watch for here — to the prior Clinton investigation," Will said. "Something can be pertinent without being significant. That is, it could be pertinent in the sense that it's redundant evidence of what we already know, which was that she was, in Comey's language, 'extremely careless' in handling sensitive materials."

"This is not news people can use," Will continued. "It's of no help to voters. And it's of no help to anyone, so far as I can see."

"It's an old saying our grandmothers told us — don't talk unless you can improve the silence," he added. "I don't think he did."[...]

Women imprison male and publicize him as pedophile

Arutz 7

Police arrested two women residents of Lod on Tuesday on suspicion of spreading text messages about a male resident of the city whom they claimed was a pedophile and dangerous sex offender. They also imprisoned him in a house and hit him.

Police suspect that one of the women discovered that the person she had befriended and asked to teach her son Torah was a sex offender, under supervision after having served a prison sentence.

The woman invited the man to the business she owns in Lod, and when he arrived, she locked the door and hit him together with a friend using her hands and a chair. After he succeeded in escaping from the place the two allegedly publicized his picture together with a warning to the public that he is a "convicted pedophile and dangerous criminal who has come to live in Lod."

The suspects were located and arrested by Israel Police and were interrogated on suspicion of attacking, unlawful imprisonment, threats, plotting to commit a crime, publicizing information causing the public to panic and publicizing harmful slander. The two women were remanded and their investigation continues.

Father confesses to drugging, raping teenage daughter

Times of Israel

Police said Wednesday they had arrested a man after his daughter filed a complaint saying he drugged and repeatedly raped her over a two-year period when she was a teenager.

An investigation was launched after the woman, 23, told police earlier in the week that she could no longer remain silent over the assaults, which she says began when she was just 15.

The man, a resident of Beit Shemesh in his fifties, was detained Tuesday and confessed to at least 15 incidents of sexual assault and rape that he remembered.

He allegedly used sleeping pills to drug his daughter before she went to bed and then assaulted her.

The woman told investigators that she would go to sleep and vaguely remember her father coming into the room and committing sex acts against her.

A search of the suspect’s home uncovered over a dozen packages of sleeping pills of the same kind that he allegedly used to drug his daughter by putting them in her food and drink.

The man has another daughter; however, he is currently not thought to have assaulted her. His wife told investigators that she noticed her husband paying special attention to one of their daughters, but claimed to have no knowledge of his crimes, Channel 2 reported.[...]

Rav Avigdor Miller would say not to vote for either Trump or Clinton

Washington Post

USA Today

Trump’s bizarre claim that the Clinton email controversy is ‘bigger than Watergate’

Washington Post

“This is bigger than Watergate. This is bigger than Watergate. In my opinion. This is bigger than Watergate.”

— Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 28

Trump has claimed that the Hillary Clinton email controversy is the biggest political scandal “since” Watergate, but now he flatly says it is “bigger” than Watergate. His campaign is now using this line:

There are a lot of unknowns about the Clinton investigation (see our Q&A here) right now, but we know a lot about the Watergate scandal. And the basic facts of both cases right now just don’t compare. Let’s take a look.

The Facts

FBI Director James B. Comey announced Friday that new emails had been found that might be relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation. He wrote a cryptic letter to Congress that contained few details.

Law enforcement sources have told reporters that the emails were found on a computer that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, who had been Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department. The emails surfaced during an underage sexting investigation into Weiner.

There is not enough information right now to know whether the new emails will lead to any other developments. It does not appear as if the FBI has yet examined them in depth, and Comey had said in the letter that the FBI “cannot yet assess whether the material may or may not be significant” or whether the emails contained classified information.

We don’t know if they were addressed to and from Clinton, or if they are emails that the FBI already had reviewed in the earlier investigation into her use of a private server.

No charges ever have been filed in the Clinton email case; Comey has said the FBI could not find evidence of “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information.” There is no way to know whether the new emails would change that. (For more, see all of our fact-checks on the Clinton email issue.)

On the other hand, we know a lot about the Watergate scandal from the 1970s, thanks to the dogged, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The scandal began with a burglary of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex and led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, and the criminal convictions and guilty pleas of dozens of people involved in the massive campaign of sabotage and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s reelection effort and the ensuing coverup.

The key here is that there were clear violations of law that led to criminal convictions of aides and co-conspirators. In total, 69 people were charged with crimes, and 48 people pleaded guilty.

Here’s a list of some of the major figures who were implicated in the Watergate scandal, including the 1972 burglary and the following coverup. All were found guilty except for Nixon, who was pardoned.

President Richard M. Nixon (Nixon resigned in disgrace while facing impeachment. A Watergate grand jury named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. One month after being sworn in as president, Gerald Ford granted a “full, free and absolute pardon” for all crimes that Nixon “committed or may have committed” when he was in the White House.)

John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and Nixon reelection campaign manager

H.R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff

John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs

Charles W. Colson, White House counsel

John Dean, White House counsel

Kenneth Wells Parkinson, Nixon reelection committee

Gordon Creighton Strachan, White House aide

Fred C. LaRue, Nixon reelection committee

Jeb S. Magruder, Nixon reelection committee

Robert C. Mardian, Nixon reelection committee attorney (Mardian’s conviction of conspiracy to obstruct justice was overturned on appeal.)

Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James W. McCord Jr., Frank Sturgis; the burglars of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters

G. Gordon Liddy, Nixon aide

E. Howard Hunt, Jr., CIA agent and former White House aide

In response to Trump’s comments, Bernstein (who authored a biography of Hillary Clinton) tweeted that there is “no way” the Clinton emails are “bigger than Watergate” or close to it:

Nick Akerman, one of the prosecutors in the Watergate case, rejected Trump’s statement that the emails case is “bigger than Watergate,” according to mic.com political reporter Celeste Katz: “Donald Trump’s statement that this is bigger than Watergate is totally absurd. There is no evidence of any violation of law. For Trump to reach that conclusion based on a total lack of evidence is reminiscent of the innuendo spread by Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.” [...]

The Trump campaign did not provide evidence of how the Clinton emails are “bigger than Watergate,” but issued this statement in response to our inquiry: “Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt candidates ever to run for president and she has enlisted the biased media to act as her campaign’s propaganda arm. Americans know that Clinton’s email scandal disqualifies her for the presidency and her candidacy will go down as one of the most unethical moments in political history.”

The Pinocchio Test

Trump says the Clinton email scandal is “bigger than Watergate,” given Comey’s letter to Congress about new emails that might be relevant to the Clinton email scandal. But there is not enough information available right now to know whether these emails will make a difference in the case. Comey’s letter said the FBI “cannot yet assess whether the material may or may not be significant.”

So far, there have been no criminal charges, and therefore no convictions or guilty pleas in the Clinton email scandal. That makes the Clinton emails fundamentally different from Watergate, where 48 people were found guilty. 

Trump earns Four more Pinocchios for this absurd comparison.

Analysis: Reality Check Shows Clinton's Path to 270 Is Stable

NBC News

There's plenty of hand wringing and stomach churning in Democratic households this week as polls show the presidential race tightening in its final days — and the Hillary Clinton campaign is making a series of moves that some see as panicked desperation.

A week out from the election, the campaign has started running ads in Colorado and Virginia, states it long ago felt comfortable leaving, and went on air for the first time in other, bluer states like New Mexico.

Meanwhile, campaign officials have seemed unusually agitated in a series of press calls and statements responding to FBI Director James Comey's bombshell on Clinton's email server. And after pledging to close the race on a positive note, the campaign rolled out a tough new ad highlighting women who claim Trump sexually assaulted them, while reintroduced former beauty queen Alicia Machado.

"Make no mistake, they are in panic," Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Monday.

But the reality is that Clinton's chances of winning 270 electoral votes have hardly changed from last week. While Democrats' agitation is palpable, it's driven more by anger than panic at what they see as unprecedented and appalling meddling by outside forces in the election.

FiveThirtyEight's election forecast still gives Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning, while the New York Times' Upshot model gives her an 88 percent chance, and Princeton University's model pegs her likelihood at 97 percent.[...]

Team Clinton feels it's been stolen from them through unpredictable interventions they views as undemocratic and one-sided, both from Comey and the Russian hackers who allegedly stole thousands of sensitive emails from campaign chair John Podesta and released them online.

Meanwhile, Democrats are practically tearing their hair out over the fact that while they, again, take on water from an email scandal that has dogged them for more than a year and half, they're running against someone many Americans say is unqualified and who seems to have a new scandal every day.

One Democratic nervous operative said he's been trying to head the wise words of Luke Skywalker — or at least Mark Hamill the actor who played, him — who told followers: "Don't panic — VOTE!"[...]