Reason.com: Weld defends Clinton, criticizes FBI; McMullin gets first newspaper endorsement, Trump passes Johnson; Clinton a “spoiler” in Utah?

At reason.com today:

* Matt Welch reports that the Provo, UT Daily Herald has become the first daily newspaper to endorse McMullin. Welch writes:

With the McMullin endorsement, our unofficial count in the daily editorial wars stands like this: Hillary Clinton 215, Donald Trump 8, Gary Johnson 6, Evan McMullin 1.

That’s quite the change from one month ago, when a Chicago Tribune endorsement of Johnson put the tally at a much more Libertarian-friendly 13 Clinton, 6 Johnson, 0 Trump. Of particular disappointment to the Libertarian Party is the non-endorsement by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which was the only daily to endorse Johnson back in 2012. (Explained the paper: “We continue to believe the Republican Party offers the best hope for the country and are supporting Republicans throughout the ballot, as has been the tradition for this page [with the exception of 2012 when it endorsed libertarian Gary Johnson for president]. We could never endorse Clinton, do not choose to recommend a third-party candidate and never would advise anyone not to vote.”)

It was The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana, that put the GOP nominee over the Libertarian Friday with a nose-holding exercise headlined “Let’s keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.” Trump now has two more endorsements than he does anti-endorsements in the form of anybody-but-Trump editorials, so I guess the ed-board unanimity has been broken. And now there’s even a #NeverHillary editorial, from The Advertiser-Tribune of Tiffin, Ohio.

* Jesse Walker points out how the “wasted vote and “spoiler” arguments apply to Hillary Clinton in Utah:

This weekend Donald Trump denounced Evan McMullin, an independent conservative candidate who’s been polling well in Utah. After declaring that McMullin had gathered his overwhelmingly Mormon support by “going from coffee shop to coffee shop” (fact check: Mormons don’t drink coffee), Trump declared that “if for some reason we lose Utah, that could have a very devastating impact” on his campaign.

That it could. Trump’s been struggling in several swing states; the last thing he needs is to lose a place that’s usually the most reliably Republican state around. And FiveThirtyEight currently gives McMullin a better shot at denying him Utah than Hillary Clinton has. He leads her in most of the state’s recent polls, and he arguably has a better chance of picking up supporters from her column than vice versa. From the Clintonites’ point of view, it would of course be ideal for the Democrat to claim the state’s six electors. But if that’s not possible, your average Dem would surely rather see McMullin collect them; at least that way they won’t help Trump get the 270 electoral votes required to win.

So if you’re a Democrat in Utah, who gets your vote? The fellow with a shot at blocking Trump? Or Clinton, the spoiler candidate?

* Bill Weld has joined a number of other former federal prosecutors criticizing Comey’s decision to send the letter to Congress about new potential evidence in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Scott Shackford writes:

Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Bill Weld criticized Comey’s letter and said Attorney General Loretta Lynch should maybe step in and “order him to stand down” if more information gets leaked.

And via the link to Tom LoBlanco at CNN:

Libertarian vice presidential nominee William Weld lit into James Comey, saying Monday that his decision to announce a review of new emails was “disgraceful” and that the FBI director and the agency were “off the reservation.”

“They’re totally off the reservation,” Weld told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Monday on “New Day,” adding that the US Attorney General may need to get involved to rein in Comey.

Weld was the head of the Justice Department’s criminal justice division during the final years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure and said throughout the interview that his criticism of Comey’s conduct was a professional critique, not political.

Pressed by Camerota on what he meant by “off the reservation,” Weld said, “It means there’s no way for Mrs. Clinton to know the evidentiary basis for which they made this update to their investigation, and they’ve said themselves they don’t know. It makes it all the more unreasonable to have waded into these waters in the first place.”

[..]

Camerota asked Weld if he thought that he and Johnson were drawing votes from Clinton and could end up tossing the race to Trump, but he argued that he was confident they were pulling moderate Republican voters away from Trump.

In comments on IPR’s Open Thread, Tom Knapp indicates that this may change:

Earlier today I tentatively predicted (better than 50% chance) that Bill Weld will appear on one or more Sunday morning TV news shows and endorse voting for Clinton “because Trump must be stopped.”

I just had a chat with a friend who is political and who has business connections in Boston. She tells me that there are indeed rumors that he’s planning to do The Full Ginsburg (This Week on ABC, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation on CBS, Meet the Press on NBC, and Late Edition on CNN), and nobody thinks he would be able to wrangle invitations to all five unless he had a real bomb to drop.