Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Sunday lashed out at news outlets who reported on emails stolen from Democratic officials and published before the 2016 election, saying Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unreasonably “banged” as a result.
“The media was playing this at the time as if this was credible sourcing and what Donna said is absolutely right,” Christie said during a panel discussion on ABC’s “This Week,” referring to Donna Brazile, whose emails were leaked to the press when she was interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
“You had to know they didn’t have all of her emails, they just took the most embarrassing ones, and you can’t assess the credibility of someone with just part of a story,” Christie continued. “But the media banged her and a lot of other people in the Clinton campaign unfairly.”
[John Bolton: Hard to believe Putin didn’t know about any effort to hack Democratic emails, servers]
Christie, who had been a Trump campaign surrogate, made the comment after Brazile, who also appeared on the panel, insisted that journalists should have emphasized in their reporting that the emails were stolen.
“The lives you put at risk when you used this information and weaponized it, it went right to the heart of what Mr. Putin was trying to do in our election,” she said.
Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday returned an indictment in federal court alleging 12 Russian officials “engaged in a sustained effort” to break into computers owned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
In October 2016, WikiLeaks published emails Brazile sent to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose account was reportedly hacked by Russians, in which she said she sometimes received questions in advance of presidential debates through her work as a CNN political commentator. The network severed ties with Brazile that month.
