NEW YORK – As Election Day nears, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are accusing each other of exceeding the mother of all modern presidential campaign scandals – Watergate – the "dirty tricks" operation that prompted a cover-up leading all the way to the White House and ultimately the resignation of a president.

"This is big stuff. This is Watergate," said Trump on Tuesday, amid charges bolstered by emails released by WikiLeaks and sensational undercover video evidence that Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee are running a "rigged election" on multiple fronts, all aided and abetted by an unprecedentedly complicit establishment media.

Trump specifically cited email evidence of the State Department "trying to cover up Hillary's crimes of sending classified information on a server our enemies could easily access." Then at Thursday’s Al Smith Dinner in New York City, Trump quipped, “Hillary is so corrupt she got kicked off the Watergate commission,” referring to the claim by Jerome Zeifman, the Democratic general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee and supervisor of Clinton’s work on the Watergate investigation, who called her a "liar" and "an unethical dishonest lawyer."

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Meanwhile, Team Clinton is trying to frame the hacking of her campaign chairman's email account as a repeat of Watergate, alleging that Trump somehow colluded with Russia to carry out the hacking operation.

"What did Trump know, and when did he know it?" intoned the senior national spokesman for Hillary for America, Glen Caplin, who cited unnamed "intelligence officials" who say Trump was "reportedly briefed in mid-August about Russia’s efforts to meddle in our election" by providing WikiLeaks with thousands of politically damaging emails from Clinton staffers.

What is the truth? With seemingly every scandal since the 1970s affixed with a "gate" suffix, are the Trump and Clinton campaigns merely indulging in hyperbole, hoping the stain of the most famous of all modern presidential scandals – one that led to the only presidential resignation in U.S. history – will stick to their opponent?

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Many experts, including a veteran investigative journalist who saw Watergate up close, say it's not hyperbole at all, at least when it comes to the mounting charges against Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Indeed, they think Watergate pales in comparison.

"This is Watergate on steroids," said Thomas Lipscomb, the founder and publisher of New York Times Books who helped publish several seminal volumes on Watergate, including the bestselling 1978 book, "The Ends of Power," authored by H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon’s chief of staff during the scandal.

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"The crimes committed by Nixon operatives in the 1972 election look amateurish in light of what we now know about the scope of illegal activities being perpetrated to steal the election for Hillary and the almost unlimited funding Clinton operatives have today from billionaire backers including George Soros," Lipscomb told WND in an interview.

The Watergate scandal began in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when burglars connected to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, known as CREEP, were caught breaking in to the offices of Democratic National Committee Chairman Larry O’Brien in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

A covert White House special investigation unit, known as the "plumbers," headed by CIA operative Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, were found to have engaged in various crimes, including burglarizing the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, noted for releasing the "Pentagon Papers" on Vietnam.

The revelations of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by the White House took time to unfold, most notably through the legendary reporting of the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In contrast, the Trump campaign is pointing to the stark and rapidly accumulating evidence contained in thousands of hacked emails as well as damning undercover videos depicting "dirty tricks" operations of voter fraud and the planting of "mentally ill" violent agitators at Trump rallies led by a prominent Democratic official who visited the Obama White House more than 300 times.

Lipscomb said the undercover video investigation by James O’Keefe and the Wikileaks’ publication of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails provide "ample proof of criminal activity that would have made both Donald Segretti and G. Gordon Liddy blush."

The Clintons' corruption is exposed in "Partners in Crime: The Clintons' Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit," available at the WND Superstore!

Segretti was CREEP’s "dirty trickster." Perhaps the most famous of Segretti’s antics were two letters he forged, ascribed to Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, then a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The letters were designed to portray Muskie in a bad light by attacking French Canadians and falsely accusing Democratic presidential rivals, U.S. senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Hubert H. Humphrey, of sexual misconduct.

And Liddy proposed the most outrageous of the Watergate dirty tricks, dubbed "Operation Gemstone," a suggestion that radical anti-war leaders be kidnapped and absconded to Mexico to keep them from causing Nixon embarrassment. There is no evidence, however, that Liddy’s "Operation Gemstone" was ever taken seriously, let alone implemented.

"Trump is right," Lipscomb told WND. "The Clintons, with the help of funding diverted from the Clinton Foundation and George Soros’ seemingly endless flow of hundreds of millions of dollars to 'progressive causes,' have set out to steal the 2016 election in a rigged election that dwarfs Watergate in its dangerous disregard for the laws of electoral politics. The total bill for the Watergate operation, including payoffs, was less than $2 million."

Lipscomb added, "The Clinton political criminals have an advantage the Nixon Watergate burglars never had – a compliant lapdog mainstream media that consistently refuses to report anything adverse to the Clinton campaign, despite the abundant evidence we now have from Clinton’s State Department emails, James O’Keefe’s videos and from the Podesta email file Wikileaks is making public."

'We’re not going to stop now'

Two undercover videos produced by O’Keefe and his Project Veritas deployed journalists posing as possible funders of Clinton campaign dirty tricks.

In the first video, as WND reported, Scott Foval, then of Americans United for Change and formerly of People for the American Way, a Soros-funded group, was shown paying for thugs to create violence to disrupt Trump rallies.

"You know what? We’ve been busing people in to deal with you f***ing a**holes for 50 years, and we’re not going to stop now," Foval said.

See the first Project Veritas video:

During the third presidential debate Wednesday, Trump accused Clinton of paying people to incite violence at his rallies.

"If you look at what came out today on the clips," he said, "I was wondering what happened with my rally in Chicago and other rallies where we had such violence. She’s the one, and Obama, that caused the violence. They hired people, they paid them $1,500, and they’re on tape saying, be violent, cause fights, do bad things.

"When I saw what they did, which is a criminal act by the way, where they’re telling people to go out and start fist-fights and start violence. In particular in Chicago, people were hurt, and people could’ve been killed in that riot. And that was now all on tape started by her."

In the second Project Veritas video, Foval discussed options for Democrats to rig elections on a multi-state basis, noting party officials don’t necessarily need to know about gray-area or illegal actions.

“Other people can make things happen that you don’t need to know about,” he said.

See the second Project Veritas video:

Foval credited Robert Creamer, founder and partner of Democracy Partners, and husband of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., for concocting many of the schemes.

O'Keefe has video of Creamer promising to consider various subversive operations and confirming that the Clinton "campaign is fully in it.”

Creamer, according to entry logs, has visited the White House an astounding 342 times since Barack Obama took office, a number that averages out to about one White House visit per week for the entire Obama administration of nearly eight years.

What about the money trail? The undercover videos document collusion and coordination – including funding – between the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, Creamer's group Democracy Partners, and the Foval Group, aimed at inciting mayhem at Donald Trump rallies across the country. These targeted events included the huge Chicago rally last March that was cancelled at the last minute due to violence, which resulted in injured police officers – violence for which the Clinton "dirty tricksters" are now revealed to have taken credit.

As the New York Times reported:

"It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this," Mr. Foval said in one clip of the video that describes how to get Mr. Trump’s supporters to start punching the people that they plant in line at his rallies.

Although Democrats are complaining that the Project Veritas videos were edited (as are virtually all TV videos), and therefore misleading, Creamer, as well as Foval, who admitted on tape to hiring "mentally ill" people to disrupt Trump events and foment violence, were ousted almost immediately, with Creamer stepping down and Foval being "laid off."

Creamer, as revealed by Stanley Kurtz, an expert on Vietnam-era radical movements, is a longtime disciple of notorious 1960s Marxist activist Saul Alinsky and a leader in Obama’s old community organizing network and its training center, the Midwest Academy, which was founded by members of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, SDS.

Stealing elections

Though today's Democratic "dirty tricksters" caught on video openly brag of facilitating illegal voter fraud, the official public view of the Democratic Party, as well as the news media, is that voting fraud is rare.

But longtime Wall Street Journal writer John Fund, in his book "Stealing Elections," says: "Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, shady recounts or old-fashion ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, although it is probably spreading because of the ever-so-tight divisions that have polarized the country and created so many close elections."

A 2011 Pew Center on the States study found that the records of a shocking 24 million voters, one in eight, on the nation’s voter registration rolls have serious errors. The errors included 1.8 million dead people still registered to vote, with an additional 2.75 million registered as active voters in more than one state.

And in August 2012, the Pew Center reported on a database created by News21, a national investigative reporting project, that revealed some 2,068 cases of voter fraud has been litigated, with 23.7 percent of the cases involving absentee ballot fraud, 19.3 percent voter registration fraud and the remaining 57 percent comprising a variety of issues, including non-citizens casting ineligible ballots and voter impersonation fraud.

To cover their tracks, far-left proponents of voter fraud have run a public relations campaign arguing that any attempt by the Republican Party to enact and enforce voter-ID laws is, by definition, a far-right, racist scheme to suppress the votes of minorities, knowing that African-Americans and Hispanics are statistically likely to vote Democrat.

Non-citizens voting

Beginning in May 2012, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott declared that as many as 180,000 registered voters may be Hispanic illegal immigrants and not U.S. citizens.

The state of Florida sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to gain access to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, or SAVE, so the list of suspect voters could be authenticated.

The Florida Department of State and the Florida Department of Highway Safety compiled the list by comparing voter registration information with driver’s license information.

In retaliation, George Soros-funded MoveOn.org ran a series of television ads in Florida opposing the effort to validate the citizenship of the registered voters in question.

"Republican Governor Rick Scott tried to kick 180,000 people off the voter rolls in his state and is now suing the Department of Justice after they stepped in to stop him," charged a MoveOn fundraising email June 27, 2012. "Rick Scott’s racist voter purge – which directly targets Latino voters – is so egregious that every one of the 67 supervisors of elections in the state – Democrats, Republicans, and independents – has so far refused to carry it out."

Indeed, on May 30, 2012, the Obama Justice Department had ordered Florida’s election division to halt the systematic effort to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.

A few months later, in the November 2012 presidential election, Romney lost Florida by fewer than 75,000 votes, making consequential the 180,000 Hispanic voters who were on the voting roles despite serious questions about their eligibility to vote.

Striking down voter ID laws

While no American can board an airplane, rent a car or even cash a check without showing a valid government-issued ID, the Democratic Party charges "voter suppression" and brings lawyers to court to litigate every time efforts are made to pass basic voter ID laws.

Techniques Democrats used to get Obama elected in 2012 included coaching students on how to vote for Obama in the state where they were attending college and also by absentee ballot in the state where their parents resided; encouraging Obama supporters to vote by absentee ballot in states where they formerly resided as well as the state in which they currently reside; and finding voters to assume the identity of someone Democratic campaign officials knew would not show up to vote, including deceased individuals still on voter registration rolls.

As WND reported, in the 2012 election Obama did not win a single state that requires photo IDs to vote, although he was victorious in four states that accept non-photo identification – Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and Washington. These four states accept as legitimate identification current utility bills, bank statements and paychecks.

'The evidence of her guilt is overwhelming'

As Election Day rapidly approaches, the Clinton scandals mount just as rapidly. Among the cascading WikiLeaks revelations are email documents providing a window into Hillary Clinton's secretive, high-priced speeches to Wall Street bankers, in which she tells them she has finds it necessary to maintain both a "public and private position" on major political issues, and that her private (and therefore presumably real) position on immigration is what she calls her "dream" of "open borders."

Of course, all the Wikileaks and Project Veritas revelations top off an already huge burden of scandals plaguing Hillary Clinton: her intentional deletion of some 33,000 emails from her unsecure private server three weeks after receiving a congressional subpoena demanding her emails, prompting legal analysts such as Judge Andrew Napolitano to conclude "the evidence of her guilt is overwhelming."

There is the apparent collusion between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice not to indict Clinton for what many experts consider a clear violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in turn has caused FBI agents to threaten to "revolt" over Director James Comey's refusal to recommend indictment. For its part, the Obama Justice Department is led by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a former Bill Clinton appointee and likely attorney general under a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, has characterized Hillary Clinton's email scandal as "worse than Watergate."

"This is the greatest scandal in the history of the United States," Caddell told Breitbart. "They all ought to be indicted. This is worse than Watergate."

At the same time, just released FBI documents reveal that senior State Department official Patrick Kennedy – a staffer who also played a major role in scandalously reducing America's security in Benghazi and thereby allowing the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack to succeed there – offered what the FBI called a "quid pro quo" (and others call a bribe) to the FBI in an effort to influence the agency to change the classification on an email found on Hillary Clinton’s unsecure private server.

And then there's the Clinton Foundation, which has generated a galaxy of apparent corruption, with, for example, the Associated Press documenting that fully half the people Hillary Clinton personally met with during her first two years as secretary of state were six- and seven-figure donors to her family's foundation. This has prompted former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor himself, to call Clinton's blatant "pay-to-play" modus operandi involving her foundation a scandal ''bigger than Watergate.''

If Americans are being assaulted with a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that equals or even eclipses Watergate, where are today's intrepid investigative journalists engaged in bringing down the guilty?

Perhaps James O'Keefe and Julian Assange, of Project Veritas and WikiLeaks, are 2016's "Woodward and Bernstein."

Because today's journalistic champions are certainly not to be found at the Washington Post, which, like virtually the rest of the nation's establishment media, have chosen to focus overwhelmingly on discrediting Trump – most recently, with decades-old, salacious and unproven allegations against the Republican candidate. They show precious little Woodward-and-Bernstein-type interest in the successive WikiLeaks bombshells, undercover videos and other independent reporting that are spectacularly exposing the many moving parts of a shockingly rigged political machine – one whose very purpose is to thwart the will of America's voters.

On the other hand, maybe there's hope: This weekend, an aging Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, described the Clinton Foundation as "corrupt."

"It's a scandal," he said.

The Clintons' corruption is exposed in "Partners in Crime: The Clintons' Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit," available at the WND Superstore!