Former Trump advisor Chris Christie claimed in an interview that the Justice Department and FBI had “no choice” but to raid the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Christie was asked by ABC guest host Terry Moran about the Justice Department’s appeal of a judge’s ruling appointing a special master in the case and whether the DOJ’s appeal would be successful.
“Look, I think the Justice Department’s chances are pretty good,” Christie said. “I think they are because their main thrust is covered by executive privilege. There is only one executive serving the privilege. The current executive is Joe Biden. A previous executive can’t assert executive privilege. They’re not executive any longer. Biden will not assert executive privilege over the documents. I think the idea that some are attorney-client privilege is going to be a bit of a reach. I think they are going to have to show a basis for that claim. For one, I think DOJ has a good chance on appeal.”
“I remember all the hysteria when this first search was done,” Christie continued. “I was on the show saying we should wait and see why DOJ did this. It’s not only the nature of the documents but the timeline. This has been 16 months that the Department of Justice has been saying, please, asking nicely, negotiating with his attorneys, taking up partial production, seeing a non-response to a subpoena. They had no choice, in my view, but to go in and take them because of the nature of the documents.”
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7 Responses
And this is just a small example of why Christie is done in the GOP. Over. He’s part of the swamp that Trump came to drain, and he fought hard to undermine Trump and prevent it. Republican primary voters will no longer support swamp denizens
Christie is just stating the facts, the same as Bill Barr has done. Nobody is above the law.
Are you aware of a woman with a memorable name, Reality Winner who served 3 years for leaking 1 document? A former Air Force linguist, Ms. Winner entered a guilty plea in 2018, after being prosecuted for leaking classified information. She had been arrested in 2017 and charged with sending a classified report about election interference to reporters at The Intercept.
The report described hacks by Russian intelligence operatives against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.
I commend him for telling the truth.
christie couldn’t take anything with him into the scif room because there’s no room for anything besides for his fat a..!!
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He is not telling the truth.
You pretend not to understand that when Trump was president he had the authority to declassify anything he liked. Therefore to charge him with violating a document’s classification you’d have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he didn’t declassify it before he left office. How could you possibly do that? It’s impossible. All he has to do is say he did it, and you have to believe him because you can’t prove he didn’t.
They could have simply asked for an injunction ordering Trump to turn over the papers, and if they were concerned about security of the papers, asked for a temporary injunction to address that. Then the case would be litigated and the questions as to ownership and classification of papers resolved in a civil court. One should note that for the search warrant to be upheld, the Democrats will have to prove Trump was acting illegally, and factual questions (did he transfer the papers to himself in a lawful manner) will need to be resolved “beyond a reasonable doubt”, and that will need to be decided by a jury, probably in Florida.
It is totally contrary to the Constitution for the government to use a criminal search warrant to seize property whose legal status is contested.
Cue all the trumpies calling Chris Christie a “RINO”