Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested the White House would have preferred that President Joe Biden be charged following last week's DOJ report that found Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" after his time as vice president.
The DOJ also said they will not seek criminal charges against the president because he was not in a “mental state of willfulness," per the report released by special counsel Robert K. Hur.
Christie made his remark during a Sunday appearance on NBC News' Meet the Press with host Kristen Welker.
Welker noted former President Donald Trump referred to the DOJ's decision not to prosecute Biden as a "two-tiered system of justice," to which Christie disagreed surmising Biden wouldn't have been investigated at all if Trump's assessment was true.
"They just would have announced that they weren't prosecuting him, and they wouldn't have given any of the reasons," Christie said. "In one respect, I think the Biden White House would have been happier if he would have been charged than for that report to come out in the midst of a re-election campaign."
Christie said the report's questioning of Biden's cognitive abilities was much more politically damaging than Biden being charged by the DOJ.
"In the end, this is the problem. Both of these candidates are people who are being questioned for their competence and being questioned for their character," he continued, "and that’s a problem for the American people.”
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"I did this, as you know, for seven years as the U.S. attorney in the fifth-largest office in the country," he said.
Christie also cited his own experience as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey
"The fact is they had to give the reasons why they weren’t prosecuting when you start off the report by saying that he ‘willfully and knowingly retained classified documents,’" he said, noting Biden did in fact violate the law, per the report's findings.
“The question, then, for the prosecutor is, ‘Then why aren’t you bringing charges?'” Christie continued. “And he gave two reasons, essentially. One was President Biden’s memory, lack of memory, his condition, and secondly, was that President Biden cooperated. Once documents were discovered, he let them go in and do whatever they needed to do to get those documents, retrieve them, as opposed to what President Trump did.”
Unlike fellow former Republican presidential candidates, Christie has insisted he will not vote for Trump "under any circumstances," though has notably not thrown support behind Haley either.
Christie said he would wait to see the "complete field," though added he doesn't see himself voting for President Biden this November.
