By Sarah Toy
BU News Service
Donald Trump arrived in New Hampshire on Friday for a rally with a gleeful announcement for his supporters: The FBI discovered new e-mails pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server when she was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” Trump said to an audience of around 1,200 people at the Radisson Hotel’s Armory Ballroom in Manchester, N.H. “I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake they made.”
On Friday afternoon, FBI Director James Comey wrote in a letter to Congress that new emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Clinton’s private email server were discovered in an unrelated case. The FBI has yet to determine whether there is classified information in the emails and if the emails are significant in any way.
Trump arrived in New Hampshire soon afterward, calling the discovery “bigger than Watergate.”
“The system is rigged — but maybe it’s not as rigged as I thought,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.
This was Trump’s fifth visit to the Granite State in the past six weeks. He trails Clinton in the state’s general election polls but told his audience that he had given $10 million of his own funds to his campaign earlier that day.
“There’s something nice about that,” he said. “Unless I lose, in which case I say, ‘What was that all about?’”
Trump spoke about his affection for New Hampshire, the state where he won his first primary, before addressing one of the state’s largest concerns.
“I never knew, honestly,” he said of the state’s heroin and opioid crisis. “You look at the beautiful little roadways and lakes and streams . . . and you say, ‘How could they have a drug problem here?’ It doesn’t fit.”
“I learned so much,” he continued. “I gave the people of New Hampshire my pledge, more than anybody else in this case, because they really taught me about what’s happening with the world of drugs pouring in.”
“If I go all the way, we are going to stop the inflow of drugs into New Hampshire and into our country 100 percent,” he said.
Jenny Cheung, 46, of Braintree, Mass., who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, said this was one of the main reasons she was voting for Trump this time.
“I have two boys,” she said. Her sons are 11 and 12 years old. “Trump talks about the border control. We need to build the wall. We need the border or else drugs will be smuggled into the country.”
After the rally, Trump joined Representative Frank Guinta, community leaders and families who lost loved ones to addiction for a roundtable discussion about the state’s heroin and opioid crisis.
