Trump Suggests Hillary Clinton Bribed Attorney General Over Email Scandal

— -- Donald Trump expressed disbelief over the FBI's recommendation that the Department of Justice not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton for the use of a private email server while she served as President Barack Obama's secretary of state and suggested that she bribed the attorney general.

"I'll tell you that we have a rigged system, folks," Trump said during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Trump accused Clinton of bribing Attorney General Loretta Lynch with the promise of staying on during her administration.

"So Hillary said today — at least according to what I saw on television, which you can't always believe. I actually found it hard to believe she'd said this, but she said today that we may consider the attorney general to go forward. That's like a bribe, isn't it? Isn't it sort of a bribe? I think it's a bribe," he said.

He continued, "I mean, the attorney general sitting there saying, you know, 'If I get Hillary off the hook, I'm going have four more years or eight more years, but if she loses, I'm out of a job.' It's a bribe. It's a disgrace."

Clinton has not said publicly whether she would keep Lynch as attorney general. Trump presumably was referring to a New York Times article that read, "Democrats close to Mrs. Clinton say she may decide to retain Ms. Lynch."

Lynch has said that she will accept Department of Justice prosecutors' decision whether to file charges against Clinton. The DOJ has not yet made a decision.

Trump also suggested that former President Bill Clinton's meeting with Lynch may have been at play in the decision not to recommend charges, although Lynch denied discussing the email controversy.

"What you witnessed today and over the last week, from Bill Clinton going to the plane, just happen to be there, just happen to be there," Trump said.

"I wonder how long he waited, but for Bill Clinton to go to the plane and then to have what happened today, where, essentially I thought — everybody thought, based on what was being said — she was guilty," he added.

"And it turned out we're not going to press charges. It's just really amazing."

He also accused Obama of playing politics with the FBI, attacking him for campaigning with Hillary Clinton earlier today in North Carolina. "It's like a carnival act," Trump said.

"You have Obama campaigning, and he's campaigning, and this was set up a long time ago, and he knew that the FBI was going to do this, because it would have been very uncomfortable for him to campaign with her, actually, if they didn't take a pass on crooked Hillary," Trump said.

He added, "We have a president who's out campaigning for crooked Hillary Clinton, and he should be home working on ISIS, where the threat is getting worse and worse. He should be working on trade. He should be working on the border."

The White House said that it had no advance notice of FBI Director James Comey's statement and declined comment because DOJ officials were still considering the case.

Though the FBI recommended that no charges be filed against Clinton, Trump, as expected, still invoked Comey's potentially damaging words.

"He talked about extremely careless. She was extremely careless. That's a tremendous word. You didn't have to be careless. You didn't even have to really know that what you were doing was wrong and you are guilty," Trump said. "Stupidity is not a reason that you are going to be innocent."

"She went through extraordinary lengths to carry out an Enron-style purge of her emails," Trump added.