Chris Christie Says He Can’t Name ‘Most Egregious’ Criminal Count Against Trump Because ‘There’s So Much’

 

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked 2024 Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie what the “most egregious” count against former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case is on Monday during CNN’s town hall.

After Trump was indicted on 37 counts last week over his retention of classified documents, Cooper asked Christie what he thought the “most egregious” of the counts is.

Christie responded, “Well, the most? 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,” he said.

Christie noted, “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,” he said. “It’s our property and the government’s supposed to have that stuff, not laying around.”

Christie said the second most egregious point was “to suggest to your lawyers that they should lie in response to a grand jury subpoena.” He revealed:

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, because this guy was asking him to lie and break the law and he wanted a contemporaneous recording of exactly what was happening, when it was happening, because he also knew that Donald Trump, as he’s done before, would throw his lawyer under the bus and say the lawyer was lying.

The third thing is he is voluntarily putting our country through this. If at any point before the search in August of ’22 he had just done what anyone I suspect in this audience would have done, which is say, “Alright, you’re serious? You’re serving a grand jury subpoena? Let me just give the documents back,” he wouldn’t have been charged. Wouldn’t have been charged with anything even though he had kept them for almost a year and a half.

Pointing out that Trump “flew the boxes up to New Jersey for summer vacation,” Christie joked, “What is this, like they’re a family member? I mean seriously.”

“And let me ask you a question, what exactly was he doing with them? Did someone remind him he’s not the president anymore? You don’t need these things anymore,” he continued. “This is vanity run amok, Anderson. Run amok. Ego run amok.”

Asked by Cooper why Trump did what he did, Christie argued, “He cannot live with the fact that he lost to Joe Biden. He can’t live with it, and look, I watch the way Joe Biden’s performing, I’d be pretty bummed out too if I lost to Joe Biden. But the fact is he did.”

“He wants to continue to pretend he’s president. He wants the trappings of the presidency around him,” Christie concluded. “And I think one of those trappings is these documents.”

Watch above via CNN.

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