Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) compared new charges against former President Trump that accuse him of working with Mar-a-Lago employees to delete surveillance footage at the club to the tactics of the fictionalized Corleone organized crime family.
“It appears that way,” Christie said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked whether he sees a clear-cut case for obstruction of justice.
It’s pretty brazen. These guys were acting like the Corleones with no experience. I mean, the day after a grand jury subpoena is served, which includes the surveillance tapes, they go down to Mar-a-Lago, and Walt Nauta appears to be the Fredo of this family. They sent him to go down there. And they sent him to go and delete it. This is bad stuff,” Christie continued.
A superseding indictment against former President Trump included three additional charges related to the former president’s alleged efforts to work with employees to delete security camera footage in the case examining his willful retention of classified documents, bringing the total number of charges to 40.
Christie, a former Trump ally-turned-critic and now 2024 GOP contender, pushed back on the claim from fellow Republican challenger Vivek Ramaswamy that there was no underlying potential crime committed – and that this was simply an alleged “process crime.”
“You can’t say there was no underlying potential crime here. This was the withholding of confidential classified information from the government after 18 months of asking Donald Trump to return it voluntarily. Not only did he not return it, he lied about having it. This is not the kind of thing we could do,” Christie said.
Christie, a former federal prosecutor, noted the potential harmful effects “on our troops and our intelligence officers by having this stuff just laying around, and him willy-nilly showing it to whoever he feels like, to be a show off on the back deck at Mar-a-Lago.”
“This is not what a former president should be doing. And it’s certainly not something that someone who wants to be president should be doing,” Christie said.