During an interview this weekend on CNN’s State of the Union, Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey currently running for the Republican nomination for president for the 2024 general election, argued that key elements of the defenses so far presented by Donald Trump against unfolding criminal charges were without merit.
Trump is specifically now facing dozens of accusations of criminal misconduct related to his handling of classified documents from his time in office, and the case against him recently expanded with a new count of allegedly unlawful retention of such materials and new claims of his involvement in a ploy to delete security footage from Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago is Trump’s southern Florida resort where contested documents were stored after his exit from office.
Trump has publicly claimed he had broad authority to take declassifying action, besides alleging he also had essentially unilateral authority upon his exit from office in the handling of presidential records from his time in power, though the federal agency known as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has specifically and publicly contested this reading of the federal Presidential Records Act.
“The ‘I can declassify whatever I want’ defense is not a defense,” Christie argued on CNN. “You can declassify whatever you want — when you’re president. You can’t do it by thinking about it. You can’t do it by mind-melding with the documents. There’s a process you have to go through to declassify, and he knows that, so there are no defenses in that regard here. Look, he’s presumed innocent. But the bottom line is, the government has made a very, very compelling case. And remember something: usually the government only includes at the most about half of the evidence they have, and what’s clear on the latest obstruction charges are, they have a cooperating witness.”
That witness, assuming they’re involved as Christie insists, may be a tech staff member who was allegedly confronted by the now third defendant in the classified docs case with a push allegedly originating with Trump for the deletion of the footage.
“The ‘I can declassify whatever I want’ defense is not a defense.”
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie responds to the new obstruction charges the Justice Department leveled against former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case. @CNNSotu #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/Ajlct2JXHj
— CNN (@CNN) July 30, 2023
