The software giant is offering an Xbox One with Kinect bundle for $399, a savings of $100. In addition to a 500GB Xbox One console, the Kinect sensor and a wireless controller, the bundle comes with three full games you can download for free. You get Dance Central Spotlight, Kinect Sports Rivals and Zoo Tycoon.

To sweeten the deal, for a limited time Microsoft is offering an additional free game of your choice. You can choose from Halo 5: Guardians, Grand Theft Auto V, FIFA 16, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Madden NFL 16, Batman: Arkham Knight, Gears of War, Forza 5 and others.

Lastly, both Project Spark and Assassin's Creed Unity will also be automatically added to your cart. That's six free games. Not too shabby, but you will have to act fast. Microsoft is only offering the deal until November 8.

Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.

Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.

On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.

The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.

Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”

Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.

Jindal, who polls better in Iowa than he does nationally, has argued that criteria for determining who qualifies for debates should be based on early state polling, not just national surveys.

“Our continuous complaint is candidate exclusion and the delusional debate polling criteria. It's unacceptable,” said Gail Gitcho, a Jindal spokeswoman. “Maybe this meeting will change that, maybe it won't. But we aren't going to shut up about it.”

Graham’s campaign has argued that there should be two debates — with two groups of seven or eight candidates selected randomly.

Carson said on Thursday that he had asked his staff to contact other campaigns to propose format changes, without sharing specifically what he thinks those changes should be.

“It’s not about me and gotcha questions. It’s about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think,” Carson said before an event at Colorado Christian University. “The whole format was just craziness … You got to be really bad for the whole crowd to boo you."

"I think the families need to get together here, because these debates as structured by the RNC are not helping the party," Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told the Washington Examiner. "There's not enough time to talk about your plans, there's no presentation. It's just a slugfest. All we do is change moderators. And the trendline is horrific. So I think there needs to be wholesale change here."

Rubio, largely considered the standout of Wednesday's debate, said the questions from CNBC's moderators "became irritating" as the night wore on.

"I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. And then, you got questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about us and then get us to react."

"The campaigns are not going to allow the networks to control this process," Huckabee told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Thursday night.

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly demanded that the debates last no longer than two hours. On Wednesday night, he even boasted of muscling CNBC into changing the format for the third debate. "Everybody said it was going to be three hours, three-and-a-half, including them, and in about two minutes, I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here," he said. "Not bad."

Sources at Fox Business Network, the hosts of the next GOP debate on Nov. 10, said that as of Thursday afternoon, they hadn't heard from any campaigns or the RNC about their debate format, but that they weren't concerned. They pointed to positive reviews of the first GOP debate, hosted by Fox News, and noted that though it's Fox Business' first debate, viewers and the candidates can expect the same results next month with moderators Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto.

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Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is facing a second round of questions about the 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya – beginning with new questions about why a Clinton loyalist could get messages to her inbox, while the American ambassador in Libya had to send his concerns about security through official channels.

“Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House committee set up to investigate those attacks. Blumenthal was a friend of the Clinton family, though hardly an expert on Libya, who repeatedly sent reports about that country to the private e-mail address that Clinton used to conduct State Department business.

“Sid Blumenthal was not my adviser, official or unofficial, about Libya. . . . On occasion, I did forward what he sent me to be sure that it was in the mix,” Clinton said. She compared Blumenthal to other friends who would buttonhole her at parties or pass her newspaper articles, trying to be helpful.

That line of questioning typified the course of the entire hearing, which began at 10 a.m. Thursday.

It has revealed little new information about the attacks that killed the American Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three others on the night of Sept. 11, 2012. Instead, Republicans on the committee have focused more broadly on questions Clinton’s judgment, using Blumenthal — and Clinton’s willingness to listen to him — as evidence that she gave friends access that she did not give to her own officials.

Clinton’s response was that e-mail records, which served as the committee’s primary sources, were not enough to understand who she listened to.

“You didn’t need my e-mail address to get my attention,” she said.

Earlier Thursday, the first round of official questioning ended with bickering among Democrats and Republicans on the committee itself: Gowdy and Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). It began when Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, asked for Gowdy to release a transcript of past testimony by a friend of Clinton’s — Sidney Blumenthal — who had sent e-mails about Libya to the private e-mail account Clinton used to conduct government business.

“Let the world see it!” Cummings shouted, after Gowdy had questioned Clinton about how — and why — she forwarded on Blumenthal’s e-mails to State Department officials. Cummings pushed for a vote to release the transcript, saying that a House “parliamentarian” (an in-house staffer who advises congressmen on congressional procedure) had said that was allowed.

“The parliamentarian told me that your motion would actually not be in order,” Gowdy replied. He then said that there would be more about Blumenthal coming: “If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far, wait ‘til the next round. We’re adjourned,” Gowdy said, and the committee broke for lunch.

That ended a three hour-plus first round of questioning, which focused far more on broad questions about Clinton’s judgment than on specific issues related to the attacks on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, and the following morning that left four Americans dead. Several Republicans noted that Blumenthal had a direct line to Clinton’s e-mail inbox, while the actual ambassador in Libya — J. Christopher Stevens, one of the four dead — wasn’t able to get his requests for increased security passed to her through official channels.

“I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said to Gowdy, before the intra-legislator bickering began. “The sharing of information from an old friend that I did not take at face value, that I sent on to those who are experts, is something that makes sense.”

The questions had turned increasingly sharp in the last hour before the break as a Republican congressman accused Clinton of misleading the public about the 2012 attacks in order to help President Obama’s reelection prospects.

“You picked the [account] with no evidence. You did it because Libya was supposed to be . . . this great success for the White House,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), saying that Clinton had blamed the attacks on reaction to an anti-Muslim video, while knowing that was false. “And now you have a terrorist attack. It’s a terrorist attack in Libya. And it’s just 56 days before an election.”

Clinton said she had not intended to mislead, but instead had sought to make sense of confusing intelligence reports from Libya and other places where protestors had overrun American diplomatic installations. After that — prompted by a friendly Democratic congressman — Clinton told the committee that she had felt the loss of four Americans in Benghazi deeply.

“It’s a very personally painful accusation” that she had misled the public, Clinton said. “Having it continued to be bandied around is deeply distressing to me. I would imagine that I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together. I’ve been wracking my brain about what could have been done, or should have been done.”

The exchanges between Clinton and Jordan — following a rapid-fire interrogation by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) — were the most dramatic portion of the hearing’s first round.

After nearly three hours of questioning, Jordan was the first Republican in this hearing to spell out the alternate history of the Benghazi episode that many on the right believe is the correct one. He spoke rapidly, interrupting Clinton at times, and personally accusing her of falsehoods.

“Where did the false narrative start? It started with you, Madam Secretary,” Jordan said. After his questioning period ended, Gowdy gave Clinton a chance to respond.

“I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book, ‘Hard Choices.’ I’d be glad to send it to you,” Clinton said. “I think that the insinuations that you are making do a grave disservice” to those in government.

Another interesting dynamic of the committee’s hearing was the contrast between the tone of Republican members like Pompeo and Jordan — who said that the meaning of Benghazi episode was already known, and it was that Clinton had failed in her job — and the tone of Gowdy, who has staked his credibility on the notion that the commission is a finder of fact, not a partisan tool to undermine Clinton. So while Pompeo and Jordan pressed Clinton to accept their conclusions about the episode, Gowdy insisted it was too early to know what those conclusions should be.

“This is not a prosecution,” Gowdy said, after a Democrat had said it was. “I’ve reached no conclusions.”

Pompeo pressed Clinton about why no one at the State Department had been fired in the aftermath of attacks.

“Why don’t you fire someone?” Pompeo said. “How come no one has been held accountable to date?”

Clinton responded that she had relied on inquiries into the attacks, which found that State Department officials had made mistakes but no misconduct rose to the level of a firing offense. “In the absence of finding dereliction or breach of duty, there could not be immediate action taken,” Clinton said.

“The folks in Kansas don’t think that was accountability,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo also asked Clinton a question related to her unusual e-mail arrangement, in which she used a private e-mail account — and a private e-mail server housed at her home in New York — to conduct State Department business. That meant that people with her e-mail address, including longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal, could reach her directly. Why, Pompeo asked, had she not been made aware of requests for greater security at U.S. outposts in Libya — passed through official State Department channels — but Blumenthal’s ideas about Libya got to her inbox?

“He’s a friend of mine. He sent me information that he thought might be of interest,” Clinton said of Blumenthal. “He had no official position in the government, and he was not at all my adviser on Libya.”

Pompeo’s questions put Clinton on the defensive for the first time on Thursday, after other Republicans misfired with questions that strayed — in time or in subject matter — from the attacks that were supposed to be the hearing’s focus. It was damaging enough that the next Democratic questioner, Rep. Linda Sanchez (Calif.), played a video clip designed to attack Pompeo himself, in which TV journalist Andrea Mitchell told Pompeo that he was wrong to say Blumenthal was a major adviser for Clinton on Libya.

In its first two hours, the hearing yielded few new details about those Benghazi attacks — or about Clinton’s use of the private e-mail account and server.

Democrats, as expected, used their time to toss Clinton softballs — or to attack the existence of the committee itself. “This committee is simply not doing its job,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Clinton. “We’ve seen that this committee is focused on you.”

The Republicans focused their inquiries on Clinton’s broader conduct as secretary, rather than on the events of the specific night in September 2012 when four Americans died in separate attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi.

One of the Republicans focused on events that happened long before that, asking Clinton how much she’d done to push the United States to use military action against Libya in the first place.

The other two tried to use e-mails sent by State Department employees to portray Clinton as inattentive to Benghazi and the danger faced by Americans there. But their inquiries did not produce much that was new. Clinton brushed aside one by saying that she didn’t rely on e-mail to conduct business, and the other by saying that she didn’t even know the employees whose e-mails were being quoted.

“They were not on my staff,” Clinton said to Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.), after Roby queried her about an e-mail between two State Department officials that indicated Clinton was not aware of a U.S. facility in Benghazi.

The first questions that Clinton faced in the hearing about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi had little to do with the attacks that killed them — but rather, were an effort to tie Clinton to the decision to use U.S. military power in Libya in the first place.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), reading from e-mails between Clinton and her staff, cast himself as an advocate for Clinton herself — “crediting” her with pushing the United States into an air attack on Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. The point was actually to blame her, since what followed Gaddafi’s defeat has been chaos and the risk of Islamist groups in the Libyan power vacuum.

“You were able to overcome opposition within the State Department” to military action against Libya, Roskam said. “You saw it, you drove it, you articulated it, and you persuaded people. Did I get that wrong?”

“Well, congressman, I was the secretary of state,” Clinton replied. She said that the decision to launch warplanes against Libya was made by Obama, not her — and that other countries, in Europe and the Middle East, had asked the United States to join them in the offensive.

Those questions shed little light on the exact circumstances of the attacks that killed the four. But they served an important political purpose: Republicans are keen to tie Clinton to the troubled state of Libya itself, as evidence of her poor judgment in international affairs. At the end of his questioning period, Roskam cut Clinton off to make his point directly.

“Our Libya policy couldn’t have happened without you,” he said. “After your plan, things in Libya today are a disaster. I yield back [the balance of my time].”

[Libya’s political dysfunction enters uncharted territory]

The second Republican to question Clinton was Rep. Susan Brooks (Ind.), who began her questioning by stacking papers on the dais in front of her — one large stack to represent the large number of e-mails Clinton had received about Libya and Benghazi in 2011 and a smaller stack to represent the same kind of e-mails in 2012.

It seemed, at first, that Brooks might have been implying Clinton had held back some e-mails from 2012 — the year of the attacks — in order to keep the Benghazi committee in the dark. But Brooks did not actually say that. Instead, her questions implied that Clinton may not have been aware of some security concerns in Benghazi in 2012 at all — because the e-mails did not specifically mention them.

That turned out to be a softball for Clinton, not a trap.

She used the moment to say that she did not use e-mail to conduct much of her business as secretary of state, rebutting questions about her use of private e-mail to conduct government business.

“I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on e-mail,” Clinton said. “There were a lot of things that happened that I was aware of and I was reacting to. If you were to be in my office in the State Department, I did not have a computer.”

Earlier in the hearing, Clinton had sought to portray herself as above political questions and to portray the panel as second-guessing the necessary risks taken by U.S. diplomats abroad.

She began her testimony by naming the four dead, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens. She said she’d known Stevens, recommended him for the job, and met his casket when it returned to American soil after the 2012 attacks.

“Nobody knew the dangers of Libya better [than Stevens]. A weak government. Extremist groups. Rampant instability,” Clinton said. “But Chris chose to go to Benghazi because he knew that America had to be represented there at this critical time.”

In her statement, Clinton sought to get in front of the day’s questions, which are likely to focus on the security precautions at the two American facilities where the four died. It was a “pre-buttal,” to use the political term, in which Clinton portrayed that kind of question as contrary to the spirit of diplomatic work.

“Retreat from the world is not an option,” Clinton said. “America cannot shrink from our responsibility to lead.”

Clinton ended her opening statement with an admonition to the committee itself, to ask questions that were not intended to undermine her politically.

“I’m here. Despite all the previous investigations, and all the talk about partisan agendas, I’m here to honor those we lost,” Clinton said. “My challenge to you, members of this committee, is the same challenge I put to myself. Let’s be worthy of the trust the American people have bestowed upon us.”

The committee’s chairman opened the hearing with a long defense of its right to exist. Gowdy began by talking about his own work — defending his committee from allegations that it is a partisan effort disguise as a fact-finding panel. That suggestion was made by a top member of the House GOP, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), a few weeks earlier. McCarthy, pressed to say what results the Republican majority had produced, noted that Clinton’s presidential poll numbers had declined after the House investigation began its work.

“There are people — frankly in both parties — that have suggested that this investigation is about you. It is not,” said Gowdy, a former prosecutor elected to Congress in 2010. “It is about what happened before, during and after the attacks that killed them. It is about what this country owes to those who risk their lives to serve it. And it is about the fundamental responsibility of government to tell the truth.”

Gowdy, in his opening statement, listed what he said were flaws in past investigations, saying they were either incomplete or too close to the Obama administration. He said that his committee was the first to discover valuable facts, including that Clinton had used a private e-mail server to conduct government business at the time of the attacks.

He said that Clinton had not been interviewed on the Hill until now because of Clinton’s own e-mail arrangement, which meant she took valuable e-mails with her when she left office.

“You kept the public record to yourself for almost two years,” Gowdy said. “And it was you and your attorneys who decided what to turn in and what to delete.”

Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, followed Gowdy with his own opening statement — an attack on his own panel’s credibility. Cummings charged that the committee had passed up chances to interview other government officials, in order to focus on Clinton herself.

“They set up this select committee with no rules, no deadline, and an unlimited budget. And they set them loose, Madam Secretary, because you’re running for president,” Cummings said. “Republicans are squandering millions of taxpayer dollars on this abusive effort to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

Cummings noted comments from McCarthy and others that he said indicated the partisan nature of the committee’s work, under Gowdy’s leadership. He called the committee “this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition.”

Organizers have said they expect four rounds of questioning, with each of the committee’s seven Republicans and five Democrats allowed 10 minutes during a questioning period.

The attacks in Benghazi — carried out by militants on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, and early the following morning — killed Stevens, as well as a State Department communications specialist and two security contractors protecting a CIA “annex.”

At the time of the attacks, Clinton was secretary of state. The members of the committee — especially the Republicans — are likely to press her about security lapses that made the U.S. facilities in Benghazi vulnerable. They will also ask about Clinton’s reaction to the violence that night, and about the Obama administration’s public statements in the days after the attack.

It seems unlikely that substantial new information about the Benghazi attacks themselves will emerge from Clinton’s testimony. She has already been through a full day of congressional questioning, in late 2013, and the State Department has provided answers to other investigations on the topic.

But on Thursday, Clinton is likely to be pressed about an issue that has emerged since that 2013 testimony. In the course of its work, the Benghazi committee discovered that Clinton had used a private e-mail address, and a private e-mail server, to conduct State Department business.

Clinton’s use of that server, housed at her home in New York, became a revelation that has dogged her presidential campaign this year. On Thursday, she could face more questions about why she did not use government e-mail, whether her e-mails were vulnerable to hackers, and about whether she has turned over all her private e-mails related to the Benghazi attacks.

On Wednesday, in advance of Clinton’s testimony, Democrats on the Benghazi committee released a transcript of testimony from one of Clinton’s top aides at the State Department. The testimony from Cheryl Mills, given in a closed hearing last month, included an account that Clinton had worked late into the night, “devastated” by the news of the deaths.

“What she really was communicating that night is, ‘I’m here because I want my team safe. I’m not here .. . . for any other reason,’” Mills recalled, according to the transcript.

Democrats published the transcript over the objections of Republicans. They said that selective GOP leaks have provided an incomplete and biased account of Clinton’s actions that night.

“Multiple Republican admissions over the past month have made clear to the American people what we have been witnessing firsthand inside the select committee for the past year — Republicans are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a partisan campaign to damage Secretary Clinton’s bid for president,” Cummings said in a statement.

A federal indictment issued in the District last year charged Ahmed Abu Khattala, captured in 2013 in Libya, with the murder of all four Americans. It said he organized the attack against the diplomatic compound because he thought it was a front for a secret CIA facility in Benghazi.

The recent deadly shooting at an Oregon community college, like so many before it, isn’t likely to lead to new federal laws designed to curb dangerous people’s access to guns. While this understandably frustrates supporters of gun safety legislation, there is reason for them to be hopeful. The National Rifle Association’s days of being a political powerhouse may be numbered.

Why? The answer is in the numbers.

Support for, and opposition to, gun control is closely associated with several demographic characteristics, including race, level of education and whether one lives in a city. Nearly all are trending forcefully against the NRA.

The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation.

Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.

An overwhelming majority of African Americans say that gun control is more important than gun rights (72 percent to 24 percent). While the African American population shows signs of slow growth, other racial minority groups are growing more rapidly — and report even greater support for gun control.

The fastest-growing minority group in America is Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population grew by 43 percent. Hispanics, which make up 17 percent of the population today, are expected to grow to 30 percent of the population in the coming decades.

Gun control is extremely popular among Hispanics, with 75 percent favoring gun safety over gun rights.

Asian Americans also represent a growing anti-gun demographic. Although only about 5 percent of the population today, the Asian American population is predicted to triple over the next few decades. A recent poll of Asian American registered voters found that 80 percent supported stricter gun laws.

After the 2012 election, Republican officials said the party needed to do more to appeal to the growing population of racial minorities. Yet the party’s refusal to bend on gun legislation highlights the difficulty of such efforts. If the GOP compromises on guns to appeal to minorities, it might lose support among its core of white voters.

Rural Americans tend to oppose gun control, with 63 percent saying that gun rights are more important than gun control. The country, however, is becoming less rural and more urban. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of people living in cities, with big metropolitan areas experiencing double-digit growth.

This shift, like that on race, is a boon for gun control. Urban residents strongly prefer gun control to gun rights (60 percent to 38 percent), for reasons that aren’t hard to understand. When gun violence is on your television news every night and police are commonplace, people may come to view guns more as a threat than a savior.

Support for gun control is correlated, too, with levels of education. Gun rights are favored by a slim majority of those who attended only high school (50 percent to 47 percent). Among those with a college degree, however,  58 percent favor gun control, compared with 38 percent for gun rights. This demographic is also trending in a favorable direction for gun control advocates. Between 2002 and 2012, enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 24 percent.

Other changes occurring in the United States further complicate matters for the nation’s leading gun rights organization. For years, the NRA focused on the interests of hunters and recreational shooters. As hunting declined precipitously after 1970 (when over 40 million Americans had hunting licenses, compared with 14 million today), the NRA’s justification for gun ownership shifted toward self-defense.

During the 1970s and ’80s, when crime rates were skyrocketing, the self-defense argument easily found an audience. Yet recent years have seen a drastic reduction in crime; today the crime rate is half of what it was in 1980. Given that this drop coincided with a serious economic downturn, which is usually a predictor of an increase in crime, it is not unreasonable to predict that crime rates aren’t likely to climb significantly anytime soon.

There is one demographic change that helps the NRA. Americans are aging, and older people tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a slim margin (48 percent to 47 percent). Yet these numbers aren’t radically different from young people (48 percent to 50 percent), so even an aging population won’t be nearly enough to counter the other, stronger demographic shifts.

Of course, the NRA will continue to fight, and fight hard, against gun control. But the heart of the organization’s power is the voters it can turn out to vote, and they are likely to decline in number. Unless the organization begins to soften its no-compromises stance on gun safety legislation, it’s likely to become increasingly marginalized in a changing America.

In the latest showing of post-debate momentum, Hillary Clinton commands the Democratic field in a new Monmouth University national poll released Monday.

Clinton took 48 percent, while her closest competitor, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, earned just 21 percent. Vice President Joe Biden, who is weighing a run but has not committed, sits at 17 percent. For Clinton, it's an increase from 42 percent in the same poll last month, and nearly back to the level of support she enjoyed in August.

Asked whether they would throw their vote behind Biden if he chooses to run, 10 percent said doing so was very likely and 31 percent said it was somewhat likely.

If Biden were to decide against running, however, Clinton's advantage jumps to 57 percent, while Sanders picks up just 3 additional points, at 24 percent. The figures are similar to those released by CNN/ORC earlier Monday, which found that 56 percent of voters would go for Clinton if Biden stays out of the race.

Biden leads the field in terms of net favorability (73 percent to 9 percent), while Clinton is close behind (77 percent to 18 percent). Sanders' net favorability is a solid 49 points, though 28 percent do not have an opinion of him.

The findings also suggest a split among Democrats about the debate schedule, a point of contention even among top Democratic National Committee officials. About 44 percent said there are enough debates scheduled, while 37 percent said there are not. The next Democratic debate — the second of six scheduled before the primary season begins — is set
for Nov. 14 in Des Moines, Iowa.

The poll was conducted by telephone from Oct. 15 to 18, surveying 340 registered voters who identified as Democratic or independents leaning toward the Democratic Party. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is reeling again after a fired GOP investigator accused the Republican majority of conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton — accusations the right says are an attempt to get the committee to pay him a settlement.

Major Bradley Podliska, who left the panel in June after about 10 months on the job, told CNN on Sunday he was fired because he refused to conduct a partisan probe of the former Secretary of State. He said the panel has veered off its original course to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 attack that left four Americans dead — instead zeroing in on Clinton following news that she used private email while Secretary of State.

But the Benghazi panel on Sunday contended that Podliska was removed from his job for different reasons. It said he refused to stand down on a "partisan" project that focused on Clinton and the Susan Rice talking points on Benghazi. It also said he has has never raised Secretary Clinton as a reason for his termination in talks over the past few weeks.
His new allegation is not mentioned in a preliminary Sept. 11 legal document laying out his case against the panel, according to a copy of that document obtained by POLITICO.

"As this process prepares to wrap, he has demanded money from the Committee, the Committee has refused to pay him, and he has now run to the press with his new salacious allegations about Secretary Clinton,” said Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) in a statement. "What the record makes clear is he himself was focused on Clinton and was instructed to stop, and that issues with his conduct and performance were noted on the record as far back as April."

The panel says he was terminated for "cause" and "because he himself manifested improper partiality and animus in his investigative work.” He denied the allegations through a lawyer.

His new accusation is sure to feed the partisan fire surrounding the committee, which has been on defense since Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) bragged almost two weeks ago that the committee’s work has hurt Clinton on the 2016 campaign trail. Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee Oct. 22.

Podliska is a Republican and believes the Benghazi investigation holds merit, making his criticism of the panel all the more stinging for the committee. A lawyer for Podliska said he was not partisan and never authorized anyone to go after Clinton.

"I'm scared. I'm nervous. I know that this is, you know, I'm going up against powerful people in Washington. But at the end of the day I need to live with myself," he told CNN. "I told my wife, I will view myself as a coward if I don't do the right thing here."

Democrats and the Clinton campaign blasted out the story to reporters as proof that the panel is a political circus.

“These are explosive allegations,” said campaign spokesman Brian Fallon in a statement. “This Republican whistleblower's account from inside the Benghazi Committee may provide the most definitive proof to date that this taxpayer-funded investigation has been a partisan sham from the start.”

Podliska, an Air Force Reserve intelligence officer, plans to file a lawsuit against the panel next month for wrongful
termination. Podliska said the termination was twofold: because of his unwillingness to focus his probe solely on Clinton and State but also for taking a leave of absence to fulfill military service obligations.

"I was fired for going on military service and I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, non-partisan, thorough investigation," Podliska said.

The military service reprisal accusation is the only one mentioned in his Sept. 11 dispute notice to the panel.
Podliska in the spring informed the panel he was being called up for more than 30 days of active duty in Germany, which he would have to serve in bits and pieces. He said the panel's staff director when informed of the matter simply wrote back "wow," and he says he was never treated the same after he returned from active duty.

The panel also denied what it called an “outlandish” allegation, noting that his former supervisor is an ex-Judge Advocate General of the United States Army who would hardly be "anti-military."

The committee says Podliska was let go in part because he had classified information on an unsecured system and because he tried to “develop and direct Committee resources to a PowerPoint ‘hit piece’ on members of the Obama Administration – including Secretary Clinton – that bore no relationship whatsoever to the Committee’s current investigative tone, focus or investigative plan.”

Emails obtained by POLITICO suggest that he sought to task interns with obligations, but one of his lawyers, Joe Napiltonia said, said he never authorized the intern to do a “hit piece” on Hillary Clinton.

“Mr. Podliska has always maintained that Secretary Clinton has some answering to do, but he never authorized anyone to disparage Hillary Clinton,” he said in an email.

On Tuesday, June 9, Podliska wrote to the panel's intern coordinator: "I'd like the interns to complete the following tasks for me." He listed three tasks, including creating a PowerPoint on all the talking points that came out of the Administration following the attack, and a "master video" that incorporated something Clinton said in September, emails from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes as well as the controversial "talking points" Susan Rice made on TV.
Conservatives have long accused the administration of trying to cover up the cause of the attack in Benghazi, which Rice at the State Department blamed on a protest rather than a terrorist attack.

But the panel says Podliska's idea was too partisan and was rejected. When he followed up on the email about a week later, the intern coordinator forwarded the message to the deputy staff director.

All were CCed on the deputy staff director's reply, which added on staff director Phil Kiko: "Not approved for reasons previously explained to Brad [Podliska]."

“Directly contrary to his brand new assertion, the employee actually was terminated, in part, because he himself manifested improper partiality and animus in his investigative work,” the committee statement says.

The Benghazi panel by and large has not been out-front on the Clinton emails issue. Rather, Senate Chairmen Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on the Homeland Committee and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on the Judiciary panel have taken the lead subpoenaing documents from Platte River Networks and other IT firms that oversaw Clinton’s server while prodding the intelligence community and the FBI to look into whether classified information was mishandled.

The closest the committee has come to the email probe was in September, when the panel called Clinton’s former top tech adviser, Bryan Pagliano, in for questioning about her email arrangement. The panel said their main focus of that interview was simply ensuring that all Clinton’s work emails were turned over, particularly after uncovering several Clinton undisclosed emails from another source that they say should have been turned over.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pulled out of the running for House speaker on Thursday, according to multiple reports.

House Republicans had been scheduled to pick their candidate for speaker on Thursday. McCarthy reportedly told his caucus at the meeting that he was pulling out. The election for the Republican candidate for the next speaker has also been postponed.

McCarthy withdrew his name from contention in a two-minute speech, according to one Republican who was in the room.

"He asked for the floor, and it was a 2-minute speech. He said the country is asking for a new face, new leadership, and he said I'm going to pull out. I'm not the right person for this job," said Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.). "I think we're all in shock."

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Penn) said he wasn't sure whether McCarthy could muster enough votes to become speaker.

"I suspect had this gone to the House floor, it might have been uncertain as to whether Kevin could get 218 Republican votes," he said.

McCarthy was considered the top contender to replace House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who will retire from Congress at the end of this month.

McCarthy has been haunted by recent comments in which he praised the House Select Committee on Benghazi for hurting Hillary Clinton politically.

Reps Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) were also running for speaker. On Wednesday, the House's conservative "Freedom Caucus" endorsed Webster.