Donald Trump said Monday that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be plagued by criminal investigations, threatening to throw the country into upheaval should she be elected.
"I'm now convinced that we will be facing the very real possibility of a constitutional crisis with many dimensions and deleterious consequences should Secretary Clinton win the election," Trump warned, hastily adding that he didn't think a Clinton victory would happen.
He then laid out a detailed hypothesis to the crowd of several thousand in Grand Rapids, Mich., conjuring a future marred by controversy should his Democratic rival win.
"She would be under protracted criminal investigation and probably a criminal trial, I would say. So we'd have a criminal trial of a sitting president," he said.
He warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders would "sit back, and they would laugh and they would smile" during a years-long probe. In the meantime, he predicted, manufacturing in the country would further decline and other problems would go unaddressed.
"Our country will continue to suffer," Trump said.
Trump has long accused Clinton of corruption, but his rhetoric has shifted lately from asserting she should face future legal trouble to contending that that she certainly would. He has used FBI Director James Comey's recent disclosure that newly found emails may be pertinent to the investigation into her private email server to bolster his argument.
He pointed to the 650,000 emails discovered in an unrelated investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner's sending inappropriate sexual messages to an underage girl as proof there was more explosive revelations to come in the Clinton probe.
Most of the emails were Weiner's, however, investigators say. Hundreds, perhaps thousands belonged to his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide, one official said.
It is unclear how many of those emails involve Clinton herself, but Trump has nevertheless begun to refer to the cache as "the mother lode."
"We can be sure what’s in those emails is absolutely devastating," Trump said.
Trump also heaped praise onto Comey, whom he has sharply criticized in the past for declining to pursue criminal charges against Clinton.
"It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made," Trump said, referring to Comey's letter to key members of Congress alerting them to the existence of the new potentially relevant emails.
"I really disagreed with him. I was not his fan. But I tell you what — what he did, he brought back his reputation," Trump said as the crowd applauded in agreement. "He's got to hang tough.... A lot of people want him to do the wrong thing. What he did was the right thing."