Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie on Monday criticized Donald Trump at length in a CNN town hall regarding the former president’s indictment alleging that he kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago while out of office.
Christie spent most of his town hall time talking Trump’s latest legal battle and the GOP rivals who aren’t addressing the indictment, which was handed down last week by a federal grand jury. “They’re playing political games with you,” Christie warned the audience.
Christie—who helped prepare Trump for the 2020 presidential debates yet eventually split from him over his incessant election denialism— described Trump’s alleged conduct as “awful,” while claiming the evidence against him is “very tight.”
ADVERTISEMENT
When asked what he believes are the “most egregious” of the 37 counts against Trump, Christie replied: “Can I give the first three most? I mean, because there’s so much.”
“First, it’s the nature of the documents that he kept: I mean, battle plans against Iran, nuclear secrets, the presidential daily brief, which has the most important intelligence information that anyone in the country can get,” Christie told Anderson Cooper.
“These are not his personal documents. This isn’t like his doodle notes on his pad, or like a nice, you know, newspaper article about himself. These are intelligence documents created by the government of the United States.”
Thirty-one of the 37 counts against Trump concern an alleged violation of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the willful and unauthorized retention of national defense information.
Trump is also charged with causing one of his lawyers to falsely claim that all classified documents that the government requested had been handed over in June 2022—something that Christie also took issue with.
“I’ve had a number of people ask me why did his lawyer make those voice memos about each meeting. I know why he did,” Christie said.
“Because [Trump] was asking him to lie and break the law, and he wanted a contemporaneous reporting of exactly what was happening, when it was happening, because he knew [that] Donald Trump, as he’s done before, would throw his lawyer under the bus and say the lawyer was lying.”
Additionally, Christie criticized Trump for purposely putting the country through the first instance of a former president being charged with federal crimes.
“He cannot live with the fact that he lost to Joe Biden,” Christie claimed, adding that it’s the result of “vanity” and “ego run amok.”
Christie apparently didn’t buy into theories that Trump was motivated to hoard classified material in order to sell it to third parties or to use as blackmail.
“This is just to show off. It’s just to show off,” he said.
