Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said President Donald Trump was ignoring the “guardrails” of the presidency by pardoning supporters convicted of political corruption and white-collar crime.
Christie said, “I think his view of this is that the biggest mistake he made in the first term was not to go further, was to have any type of guardrails placed upon him by either the people he puts around him or by recognition of the law and norms and customs for the position of the presidency. And so you see it in a whole bunch of different ways we just looked at. You see it in pardons in particular, he has categories of pardons. You have the pay-to-play pardons. You have the reality TV stars turned supporters, and then you’ve got those who are just victims of what he calls weaponization of the Justice Department. But all of them have one thing in common, which is you’ve got to be whole hog for Donald Trump. Never before have we seen a president who makes it a gate to getting a pardon to being a political supporter of his a vocal current political supporter.”
He continued, “The other thing is he eliminating white-collar crime in America. He’s saying it doesn’t exist, anything goes.”
He added, “He is a numbing agent, is what he is. He does so much that he just makes you numb. And so looking in the political corruption area, he’s particularly focused on this to try to make people think any allegation of political corruption is partisan no matter what and, therefore, invalid.”
Christie concluded, “So what he’s doing is saying in the white-collar crime area, both in business and in politics, there is no corruption. It’s all weaponization. It’s all depending upon which party you’re in, and he’s going to pardon all of these folks because they support him.”
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