Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) issued a dire warning on the future of the U.S. Justice Department under President Donald Trump.
Christie, a former prosecutor, compared the Justice Department’s efforts to indict critics of the president to “ham sandwiches” during ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. He said that the failure to indict six Democrats over a social media video undermines the “credibility” of the Justice Department.
“This false idea that grand juries, you can indict a ham sandwich, it is not true. And the Trump administration is proving that. They’re putting a bunch of ham sandwiches up there and the grand juries are not indicting them,” Christie said.
“The fact is that the previous Justice Departments before this one took very seriously bringing charges to a grand jury and asking to indict a fellow American. And what you’re seeing now is absolutely the destruction of the credibility of the Justice Department with our judicial system,” he added.
He said that judges “are not giving the benefit of the doubt anymore to assistant U.S. attorneys when they come into court.”
“And so, the damage that gets done here by this just pure vendetta prosecution is long term. And it’s going to be very, very difficult to fix over the course of the next decade,” he added.
Trump lashed out at six Democrats after they posted a video last year reminding active-duty members of the military that they do not need to follow illegal orders. Last week, a grand jury refused to indict the six Democrats over the video after the federal government sought to bring charges against them.
The video, shared in November, sparked widespread outrage from Trump, who accused the Democrats of “seditious behavior.” It also led to an investigation from the U.S. Defense Department into U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who has argued that the video is protected by his First Amendment rights.
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