Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie took aim at fellow 2024 GOP hopeful Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, for dodging a question about the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol by saying that he was nowhere near the Capitol that day.
“He wasn’t anywhere near Washington. Did he have a TV? Was he alive that day? Did he see what was going on? I mean, that’s one of the most ridiculous answers I’ve heard in this race so far,” Christie, a former New Jersey governor, told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins late Wednesday.
During a New Hampshire campaign event earlier this week, a high school student asked DeSantis whether former President Trump “violated the peaceful transfer of power” in connection to the Jan. 6 attacks. The Florida governor pivoted to the student’s background and the 2024 election before saying he “didn’t enjoy” seeing the attacks but avoided directly answering the student’s question.
“I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “Obviously, I didn’t enjoy seeing, you know, what happened. But we gotta go forward on this stuff. We cannot be looking backwards and be mired in the past.”
During the CNN interview, Christie bashed DeSantis for his response, pointing out that people lost their lives and the rioters put lawmakers and former Vice President Mike Pence in danger.
“You don’t have an opinion about Jan. 6, except to say, ‘I didn’t particularly enjoy what happened?’” Christie said about DeSantis’s remarks. “People were killed. People were killed, Kaitlin, as you know that day, on Capitol Hill defending the Capitol. We had members of Congress who were running for their lives. We had people trying to hunt down the Vice President of the United States, chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence.’”
“And Donald Trump the entire time sat outside the Oval Office, that little dining room of his, eating a well-done cheeseburger and watching TV and doing nothing to stop what was going on until it got to the point where even he could no longer stand it,” Christie continued.
Christie also said that he knows the student who asked the question because the student has also attended Christie’s town halls in New Hampshire.
When asked how he would answer the student’s question, Christie said he would tell the student that Trump was “principally responsible for it.”
“I would say it was one of the most disgraceful days in American history,” he said. “And that the president was principally responsible for it. One, through the conduct and his words from election night forward, inciting people and insisting that the election was stolen when it wasn’t. Through his speech that day, when he attacked directly his own vice president and incited those people to be angry at Mike Pence, who was just performing his constitutional duty.”