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Chris Christie calls Trump legal team a 'national embarrassment'
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had harsh words for President Trump’s legal team as it pursues its increasingly quixotic quest to overturn the November election.
“Quite frankly, the conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Trump lost the Nov. 3 election to President-elect Joe Biden, but has launched a series of lawsuits seeking to claim victory in states narrowly won by the Democrat. But the cases have been largely dismissed, and judges have consistently rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.
“Yes,” Chris Christie tells @GStephanopoulos when asked if it’s time for President Trump to stop challenging the 2020 election results, adding that the president’s legal team has been a “national embarrassment.” https://t.co/HeCzKaBaGO pic.twitter.com/aWBxlcRu1h
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 22, 2020
The Trump campaign lost one of its most important cases on Saturday night, when a federal judge in Pennsylvania both rejected a major Trump lawsuit in the state and excoriated the president’s legal team for its speculative arguments. In the decision, the Republican judge even mocked the Trump team for presenting a “haphazardly stitched together” argument, “like Frankenstein’s Monster.”
Despite the humiliating legal setback, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani issued a statement on Saturday claiming that the rejection “turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court” through the appeals process.
Both Giuliani and fellow attorney Sidney Powell have advanced a number of conspiracies about the election, including last week at a surreal press conference in which they claimed a “massive influence of communist money” had been funneled into the election.
On Sunday, Christie cited the conduct of Powell in particular for her unsubstantiated claim that the Republican governor of Georgia is part of a conspiracy to rig the election against Trump.
“Sidney Powell [is] accusing Gov. Brian Kemp of a crime on television, yet [is] unwilling to … lay out the evidence she supposedly has,” said Christie, a former U.S. attorney. “This is outrageous conduct by any lawyer.”
Georgia is one of the states narrowly won by Biden; Trump is pursuing a recount unlikely to change the result.
Christie further praised Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., for clearly acknowledging Biden’s victory after the Pennsylvania judge’s ruling on Saturday night. In a statement, Toomey described Judge Matthew Brann as a “longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.” Trump responded to the statement on Twitter, where he called Toomey “no friend of mine.”
Christie said he hopes more Republicans step forward.
“As much as I’m a strong Republican, and I love my party, it is the country that has to come first,” he said.
One Republican, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, said Sunday that he was “embarrassed that more people in the party aren’t speaking up” about Trump’s refusal to concede. Trump took a shot at Hogan on Twitter not long after.
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