With the cloud of an FBI investigation lifted, Democratic US candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican US candidate Donald Trump struck strikingly different tones as they moved into the final hours of a volatile, nearly two-year-long presidential campaign.
After days of full-throated attacks on Trump’s qualifications and temperament, Clinton cast herself as the candidate of “healing and reconciliation” — perhaps a surprising position for a woman who has long been one of the most divisive figures in US politics.
She started her Sunday with a visit to an African-American church in Philadelphia, where she spoke of her candidacy in almost spiritual terms, as she tried to motivate black voters in the crucial swing state to support her.
Photo: AP
And she ended with an evening rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, featuring remarks from Khizr Khan, the Muslim-American lawyer whose US Army captain son was killed in Iraq, and soft rock from folk singer James Taylor.
“This election is a moment of reckoning,” she told voters in Manchester. “It is a choice between division and unity, between strong, steady leadership and a loose cannon who could put everything at risk.”
Clinton said she was “hopeful and optimistic” about the future.
Meanwhile, Trump voiced new confidence as he brought his campaign — and his dark visions of a rigged US economic and political system — to longtime Democratic strongholds.
“This is a whole different ballgame,” Trump said at a rally in an airport hangar in Minneapolis, Minnesota, predicting victory in a state that has not cast its electoral votes for a Republican since 1972.
“We are going to have one of the great victories of all time,” he said at a rally in Virginia, comparing the US election to the Brexit vote by the UK to leave the EU “times 50.”
Overshadowing the flurry of last-minute campaigning was FBI Director James Comey’s latest letter to the US Congress, informing lawmakers that the bureau had found no evidence in its hurried review of newly discovered e-mails to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.
Still, Trump continued to seize on the e-mail issue, despite the FBI’s finding.
“Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it, the FBI knows it, the people know,” he said at a rally that drew thousands to an amphitheater in the Detroit suburbs.
Comey’s move capped a stunning chapter in the bitter, deeply divisive contest.
His initial decision on Oct. 28 to make a renewed inquiry into Clinton’s e-mails public upended the campaign at a crucial moment.
Clinton’s campaign, furious at Comey’s handling of the review, welcomed Sunday’s announcement.
Her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters: “We’re glad this matter is resolved.”
The new review involved material found on a computer belonging to disgraced former US representative Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
While Comey was vague in his initial description of the inquiry, he said on Sunday that the FBI reviewed communications “to or from Hillary Clinton while she was [US] secretary of state.”
Based on that review, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI was not changing the conclusion it reached this summer.
Then, Comey said, “no reasonable prosecutor” would recommend Clinton face criminal charges for using a private e-mail system while at the US Department of State.
Clinton still appears to hold an edge over Trump in the campaign’s final stretch. The Republican has a narrow path to victory that requires him to win nearly all of the about a dozen battleground states that are still up for grabs.
The candidates spent Sunday sprinting across swing states as they sought to lock up support ahead of election day.
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