Chris Christie on Monday became the third 2024 Republican presidential candidate to sit down with CNN for a televised town hall discussion, this time moderated by Anderson Cooper. On top of that, he was grilled about a second criminal indictment and 37 facing former President Donald Trump for taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate after losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Asked for his opinion on the most damaging part of the 41-page document, Christie struggled to point to just one component. “The most?” He asked. “Can I have three? Because, you know, there’s just too many.”
Before breaking down those three “most egregious” elements of Trump’s impeachment by former New Jersey governor Jack Smith, special counsel out of Florida, Cooper asked Christie to explain why he thinks Trump “is more likely than the original show.” would be worse”.
“Because he is very angry now. He is angry and he is vengeful and he said: ‘I will be your retribution.’ Well, I don’t want him to be my vendetta, I don’t need him to do that and I don’t think anybody in America needs it. He wants his vendetta for himself,” Christie said. “I believe is that if he does go back to the White House, the next four years will be about him settling scores with everyone who he feels wasn’t entirely nice to him… [He] Especially since his presidency, he has shown himself to be completely self-centered, completely self-consuming, and to care nothing about the American people.
Cooper then requested Christie, a former US Attorney, to give his professional legal opinion regarding “the most egregious” of the 37 allegations against Trump.
“Well, most? Can I have three at most? Because, you know, there’s a lot. I mean, first it’s the nature of the documents that he kept,” the politician began. “I mean, the war plans against Iran, the nuclear secrets, the President’s daily brief containing the most important intelligence that anyone in the country has ever had. Can also get it. These are not his personal documents. It’s not, like, his doodle notes on his pad or a nice newspaper article about him. These are intelligence documents created by the United States government.”
The second, Christie said, was the fact that Trump lied to his lawyers in response to grand jury subpoenas for classified documents before the FBI finally raided his estate in August 2022.
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Why did their lawyer make those voice memos about every meeting?’ I know why he did it: because this man was telling him to lie and break the law and he wanted a real-time recording of what was actually happening because he knew Donald Trump as well, as he had done before, he would have thrown his lawyer down the bus,” Christie said.
And Christie’s third most egregious element of the latest indictment against Trump was simply the fact that “he’s willingly putting our country through this.”
“If at any point prior to the discovery in August of ’22, he did what I suspect is anyone in this audience who says, ‘Okay, you’re serious, you’re serving on a grand jury. Here’s the subpoena, let me just give the documents back’ — he wouldn’t have been charged, even if he had kept them for about a year and a half, he wouldn’t have been charged,” Christie said. Nothing was to happen. That’s all he is saying – again, this is what I was saying at the top – he is saying, ‘I am more important than the country.’
All of the above was within the first 10 minutes of CNN’s town hall — a 90-minute televised event that covered everything from the presidential hopeful’s stance to crime rates to Biden’s approval rating. But when it came to the Trump impeachment, Christie was sure of one thing: There was much more to come.
“There’s going to be a lot more information coming out when they come to trial,” he said, adding, “In particular, I think there’s going to be a lot of witnesses who worked for Donald Trump.”
