A small crowd gathered at a country club laughed at the joke. One man shouted: “You mean Bill the rapist?” Trump's campaign has yet to respond to the comment, and Trump did not address it in his own remarks at the event.

Sununu was governor of the state in the 1980s and was later White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush. He is the father of former senator John E. Sununu and Christopher Sununu, who holds a local office and is running for governor.

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His remarks took place before Trump took the stage.

Sununu went on to encourage New Hampshire Republicans to vote for Trump, even if they are reluctant to do so. Sununu said that he has had his own concerns about Trump but that the Republican nominee is the better option.

“Hillary Clinton makes it damn easy for me to support Donald Trump,” Sununu said.

This New Hampshire town is not far from Massachusetts and, at one point, Sununu mentioned Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), calling her a “not quite self-avowed socialist.” The crowd booed and then there were shouts of: “Pocahontas!” That is the nickname Trump has given Warren because her claim of having Native American heritage has been challenged. Some in the crowd then started making war cries.

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Sununu also mentioned the letter that FBI Director James B. Comey sent to lawmakers late last month announcing that the agency had found more emails that might be related to an investigation into Clinton's private email server.

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“A lot of folks are waiting for a smoking gun. There's not going to be a smoking gun between now and the election. There's not going to be one,” Sununu said. “But what happened when Comey did that, he ripped the scab off what all of us, including many of Hillary's supporters, really knew. ... It was the straw that broke the camel's back. It reminded America that under the Clintons, the Democratic Party has been infused with a culture of corruption for the last 25 years.”

A man in the crowd then shouted: “Lock her up and throw away the key!”

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Soon the crowd began chanting: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” The man in the crowd kept chanting: “Throw away the key! Throw away the key!”

Trump did not mention Sununu's joke as he spoke for more than 30 minutes before a crowd of nearly 900, but he did continue his line of attack on Clinton, accusing her of committing crimes and being "an unstable person."

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Trump did give a shout-out to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has played a key role in Trump's campaign in the state and called Clinton a c--- in a tweet earlier this week. The tweet reported the results of a Pennsylvania poll for Trump and Clinton, although instead of using her name, the tweet used a four-letter word starting with "c." The tweet ends: "Go Trump Go!"

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The tweet was quickly deleted, and at first Miller said his account was hacked. His office later said a staffer had “inadvertently retweeted a tweet that they were not aware contained a derogatory term.”