Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday. It’s been busy the last 24 hours, so let’s get right to the Digest:
1. Donald Trump held a rally Tuesday as close to Minnesota as he’s likely to get before Election Day. He was in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, about 80 miles east of St. Paul, and a lot of Minnesotans made the trip to hear what he had to say. (MPR News)
2. Campaign finance reports made public Tuesday show that independent expenditures had neared $15 million with two weeks remaining in the battle for control of the Minnesota Legislature. Both the House, now run by Republicans, and the Senate, currently in DFL hands, are at stake.At least eight legislative races have already blown past a half-million dollars in outside group ad spending, with several more on course to exceed that amount by Election Day. (MPR News)
2. Once again the MNsure insurance exchange had a rough first day of sign-ups for people looking to buy health insurance for 2017.By noon, state officials issued a statement saying the MNsure website and nearly 70 other state websites had been experiencing intermittent outages. People trying to buy insurance over the phone also had problems, andGov. Mark Dayton said that problem was caused by robocalls. (Star Tribune)
3. With polls showing a tight race, the campaigns for Republican Stewart Mills and incumbent DFL Congressman Rep. Rick Nolan are hustling in the week before Election Day to turn out voters for one of the nation's most competitive and expensive congressional races. Minnesota's 8th Congressional District covers the eastern half of the state from just north of the Twin Cities to the Canadian border. This year outside groups on both sides have spent more than $10 million on the race, mostly for a series of increasingly bitter TV ads. But now it’s time to convince people to actually vote. (MPR News)
4. FBI Director James Comey’s decision to tell Congress about the new batch of emails that may be related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server broke a pattern the bureau established earlier in the year. Comey chose not to disclose two other investigations. One involved Donald Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his business dealings in Ukraine. The second focused on Hillary Clinton's relationships with donors to her family foundation. (New York Times)
5. In another puzzling development the FBI on Tuesday released documents from a 16-year-old investigation involving then-President Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich. Hillary Clinton’s campaign questioned the timing of the release, which came on an FBI Twitter feed that had been dormant for a year until Sunday. The FBI said in Tuesday night that the documents were part of a routine release and that the information had been requested many times.(NPR)
