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8 Nov, 2016 12:41

'Democrats are tired of Clinton scandals, they may not be motivated to vote'

'Democrats are tired of Clinton scandals, they may not be motivated to vote'

You don’t see the Democrats trying to devour Clinton as the Republican elites have done with Trump, says Daniel McAdams, an executive director at Ron Paul Institute. The Democratic Party is much more disciplined, but their voters are not enthusiastic about Clinton, he added.

After months of campaigning, the US election race is about to cross the finish line with Americans heading to the polls to decide who'll become the country's 45th president.

The next leader will almost certainly come from one of two candidates, a former Secretary of State, engulfed in scandal over her private email use and suspicions about her health or a billionaire tycoon, accused of sexual harassment and branded a xenophobic racist.

It's all left many voters feeling they're choosing not the president they want but voting against the candidate they don't.

According to one survey, less than 30 percent of both Trump and Clinton supporters will be excited if their candidate wins.

READ MORE: ‘FBI chief tries to cover himself between two elites, but not doing good job’

RT: When the FBI announced it reopened the probe, it was seen as a major blow for the Clinton camp, with many analysts being sure that the agency had picked up an important trail in the investigation. How come they took back their claims just a week after that?

Daniel McAdams: I think it is absolutely extraordinary. It must be unprecedented in the history of American elections that one individual, the director of the FBI, would carry so much weight with the election. When the announcement came out on October 28 that the FBI was looking into these new emails – some 600,000 - it threw the Hillary Clinton camp into a tail spin. As a matter of fact, the Senator Minority leader Harry Reid said that the director of the FBI may be up for charges for trying to interfere in the elections. And now just a few days later, everything is completely turned upside down and they’ve say ‘We’ve looked at all of those emails; there is nothing to see here.’ But there is a lot to see here. And it is an absolutely unbelievable, chaotic situation right now. 

RT: The news of the reopening of the probe was downplayed by Hillary Clinton herself, who said it was unlikely to change voters' minds. Do you agree that it had little impact on her supporters?

DM: I think the FBI Director Comey has achieved what probably few people can achieve in Washington – he has become absolutely hated by both parties. The announcement that he was opening the investigation again, I think did do quite a bit of harm to Hillary. It gave the Trump campaign a real shot in the arm. It really motivated his people, it helped their fundraising significantly. But on the other hand, you can say that him exonerating her just a day before the election could have an effect of really bouncing her back. She would be able to say to her supporters: “Look , there is nothing to see here, they have investigated me twice. They’ve looked into everything. They’ve done everything they can and they still can’t find anything on me. This is just a witch hunt." You could argue that she could benefit as well. In the meantime, things that we do know about what the Clintons have done are now also being swept by the wayside in this idea that she has been exonerated. The Clinton Foundation, the ‘pay-to-play,’ the corruption, the foreign influence in the State Department through donations to the Clinton Foundation… the collusion between the US mainstream media and the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton camp. This is a huge scandal but it’s not going to be talked about. So I think in a sense you could say she’s getting off pretty well.

Carla Howell, political director, Libertarian Party commented on the issue: "According to the polls, Hillary Clinton has maintained a slight lead and still has it. But it is going to be up to the voters. Polls are not always right. She is running against a very unpopular Republican, Donald Trump and because the media in the US does not cover the alternatives, the majority of the Americans don’t even know they have the Libertarian choice. That’s how little media coverage we have received compared to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton."

RT: Apart from the e-mail scandal, which is arguably the largest one in her campaign, she's also been accused of having close relations with Wall Street, using the Clinton Foundation for political manipulations, cooperating with the media. But all of that has not damaged her campaign that badly, has it?

DM: I think she will now be able to divert attention away from all of this things and say: ‘This is all about the emails and I’ve been exonerated.’ The IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, went after Conservative- and Libertarian-oriented 501C3 charities. Throughout the Obama administration they were targeted. Yet you have clear, concrete evidence that the Clinton Foundation is, at the very least, engaged in some very underhanded practices when it comes to accepting millions of dollars from overseas, from Gulf Arab countries in exchange for meetings with the Secretary of State, meetings with former president Clinton. This is all out there. So you can see there are two standards of justice in the US. One standard for the very well-connected and powerful and the rest for the others. And I think that is what the American people are going to be extremely angry about if indeed Hillary does manage to pull it off tomorrow.

Craig Murray, author and human rights activist told RT: "I don’t think Wikileaks publications will have a major effect on the result because the MSM has been conditioning a Clinton win for years. And that is partly what the leaks show. It is interesting that in the last lot of DNC emails, we had evidence that Hillary Clinton was being secretly fed with the questions in advance of the televised debates. And now we have the other side of the coin with the evidence that the DNC was able to provide CNN with the questions they would ask Donald Trump in debate. This is an extraordinary bias of the media. My expectation is that Clinton will win as expected."

RT: Do you think she'll win tomorrow?

DM: I think Hillary Clinton has a core of support. Historically, the Democratic Party has been a much more disciplined party. You certainly didn’t see when Bernie Sanders was defeated and he was defeated in the most underhanded way: there was collusion, there was vote fraud, there was all sorts of things to get Bernie Sanders out of it. But you didn’t see the Democratic Party consuming itself as the Republican Party has done over Trump. The Republicans chose Donald Trump who was an outsider, who is a maverick. It is a reflection of the anger within the Republican Party rank and file. But what the Republican Party elites do – they proceeded to devour Trump, to discredit him, to harm him, to run people against him. And you just didn’t see that with the Democratic Party when you had a far more underhanded process. I think that the Democratic Party is much more disciplined, their voters are more disciplined. They are not enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton however and that could be something significant for tomorrow. There may be people who are simply not motivated, they are tired of these scandals, they may be not motivated to vote.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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