Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Sunday called out the breathless media coverage regarding escalating tensions between President Trump and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen as federal prosecutors mount legal pressure on the attorney and fixer.
“Everybody needs to take a step back here,” Christie, a Trump ally, said during a panel discussion on ABC’s “This Week.” “And there’s a certain level of hysteria that goes along with this story, the way it’s reported, and quite frankly I don’t think that what we know right now, what we know, merits that.”
Christie’s comments follow Lanny Davis, the lawyer defending Cohen as he faces a federal investigation into his business dealings by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, releasing one of several audio tapes to CNN last week in which Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing how to go about buying the rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about an affair she claimed to have had with Trump more than a decade ago.
[Opinion: CNN’s infamous Michael Cohen tape of Trump has zero useful information]
CNN also reported that Cohen was preparing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump knew in advance that his son Donald Trump Jr. and officials from his 2016 campaign were planning to meet with Russians in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite Trump’s claims he had no prior knowledge of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Christie on Sunday questioned the accuracy of the news reports and reiterated how collusion did not amount to a crime even if they were true.
“And so the fact of the matter is that we’re a long way away yet from having anything to talk about here,” he continued. “Cohen still has to make a deal and that deal is probably not going to be with Bob Mueller. That deal is going to be with the Southern District of New York, who are the people who are investigating him for potential crimes and the ones who initiated the raid of his office and hotel room and home.”
