Clinton and Trump ‘neck and neck’ in poll as email scandal bites before final full week of campaigning begins
Top poll shows the under-fire Democrat's lead slip from 12 points to just two
AS the latest twist in her email scandal unfolds, a shocking new poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by just TWO points in the race to be US president, inside the margin of error.
The same Washington Post/ABC poll had Clinton enjoying a huge 12-point lead just one week ago.
Worrying times for Hillary Clinton as the FBI probe continues
A New York Times Upshot/Siena poll released on Sunday had the GOP nominee up four points in Florida in a four-way race, 46 percent to 42 percent.
All the new polls were conducted before FBI director James Comey dropped his new emails bombshell on Friday.
Their existence came to light in a brief letter sent by Mr Comey on Friday to leading members of Congress.
The letter claimed the emails may be “pertinent” to the investigation into her email server which the FBI formally concluded in July.
Mr Trump declared at a rally in Las Vegas today: "Corruption is corrosive to the soul of a Democracy, and it must be stopped. We have one ultimate check on Hillary’s corruption, and that is the power of voting.
"The only way to beat the corruption is to show up and vote by the tens of millions, including millions of people voting for the first time in their entire lives."”
Ms Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, said the director’s handling of the matter was “inappropriate”.
He also urged Mr Comey to be more transparent because the disclosure came “in the middle of the presidential campaign so close to the voting”.
The first sign of Mr Trump closing the gap with his Democratic rival in the Sunshine State came in the middle of last week, when a Bloomberg News poll gave him his first lead there for several weeks.
Sunday also saw the release of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll that had them essentially tied in Florida with Ms Clinton at 45 per cent and Mr Trump at 44 per cent.
Ms Clinton was in Miami this weekend and joined Jennifer Lopez on stage at a concert held in support of her campaign.
What's the deal with Hillary Clinton's emails?
Shortly before she was sworn in as secretary of state in 2009, Hillary Clinton set up an email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
She then relied on this server, home to the email address hdr22@clintonemail.com, for all her electronic correspondence - both work-related and personal - during her four years in office.
She also reportedly set up email addresses on the server for her long-time aide, Huma Abedin, and State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.
She did not use, or even activate, a state.gov email account, which would have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the US government.
Mrs Clinton's email system became a national story the first week of March 2015, when the New York Times ran a front-page article on the subject.
The article said that the system "may have violated federal requirements" and was "alarming" to current and former government archive officials.
According to Mrs Clinton, the primary reason she set up her own email was for "convenience".
During a press conference at the UN, she said that she preferred to carry only one smartphone with one email address, rather than have two devices - one for work and one for personal affairs.
Source BBC