- Chris Christie said this weekend that the events leading up to January 6 were “driven from the top.”
- Christie pointed the finger at people he called “C-team players” around Donald Trump.
- He said Trump, unwilling to concede the election, was spurred by those saying what he hoped to hear.
Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey gave his take on the events leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, calling it a process “driven from the top” and “executed by C-team players.”
Christie made these comments Sunday in an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week” hosted by George Stephanopoulos. The former governor was responding to a comment from Stephanopoulos about a PowerPoint presentation sent by Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, detailing how the Trump team could work to overturn the 2020 US election.
—This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 12, 2021
“It seems like, every single day, Chris Christie, we’re learning more about what was going inside the White House in those days leading up to January 6,” Stephanopoulos said, referring to Meadows’ PowerPoint presentation. “It may explain why the former president and his allies are working so hard not to cooperate.”
Christie replied that the things being revealed now about the January 6 riot were “driven from the top.”
“I mean, the president made it very clear that he did not want to concede the election, that he would not concede the election,” Christie said. “And you got a bunch of people around him by the time we got to the end, with very few exceptions, that were C-team players, at best, on their best day.”
He added that the “C-team players” told President Donald Trump what he wanted to hear during Trump’s last days in office.
“There were plenty of people on the outside who were telling him this is over, and you need to concede,” Christie said. “He didn’t want to hear that.”
Christie was critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to block House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s nominees for the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.
“The problem now is that because she dictated — for the first time in my memory — who the minority party could have on a committee, it does affect to some extent among people in my party, the credibility the committee has,” he said, before adding that he thought the committee was doing “important work.”
“In the end, the facts are going to come out, but let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “This was a driven-from-the-top process executed by C-team players. And that’s why it looks like a Keystone Cops operation, because it was.”
Christie’s new comments are his latest salvo in a feud with the former president. On November 8, Christie urged Trump to “move on” from the 2020 election and “tell the truth.”
Trump then released a statement the next day via his spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, claiming Christie was “just absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 Election Fraud.”
“Everybody remembers that Chris left New Jersey with a less than 9% approval rating — a record low, and they didn’t want to hear this from him!” Trump said in his November 9 statement.
Trump on December 8 also put out a statement via Harrington, commenting on how sales of his new book “dwarf Chris Christie’s.”
Separately, Christie also accused Trump of withholding his positive coronavirus test result and transmitting the virus to him.