Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Thursday that he believes former President Trump kept classified documents after leaving the White House because “he wants to pretend he’s still president.”
“I think it was purely ego,” Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I think, Jake, he could not and still cannot to this day deal with the fact that he’s the only person outside the state of Delaware to ever lose to Joe Biden, and he wants to pretend he’s still president.”
“He wanted to continue to pretend he was president and show these things to people and say, ‘Look what I still have, look what I still know,’” Christie added.
Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents, about 300 of which were recovered from his Mar-a-Lago residence last year.
The federal indictment accused the former president of improperly retaining national defense information, sharing it with individuals who did not have proper security clearances and making efforts to prevent the federal government from recovering the classified documents that remained in his possession.
In a partial transcript of an audio recording that was included in the indictment and later released by CNN, the former president appears to reference a classified Pentagon document during a July 2021 meeting with a writer and publisher working on a memoir of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“I have a big pile of papers. This thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump said, referring to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley. “They presented me this — this is off the record but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”
Trump also described the document as “highly classified” and “secret information” and acknowledged that he no longer had the ability to declassify it, undercutting one of his previous arguments.
He has since claimed that he was not actually holding the document during the meeting.
“I would say it was bravado; if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” Trump told Semafor and ABC News. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”
Christie, a one-time ally of the former president, has repeatedly taken swings at Trump since launching his campaign last month, including over the latest indictment.
In the wake of the indictment, the former New Jersey mayor knocked his fellow Republicans for defending Trump’s conduct.
“How about blame him?” Christie said during a CNN town hall last month. “He did it … He took documents he wasn’t supposed to take. He kept them when he was asked for them back? They got a grand jury subpoena. He refused to comply. They raided his home finally because he refused to comply … All those things were brought on himself, as was this indictment,”
“Everyone’s blaming the prosecutors. He did it. It’s his conduct,” he added.