New Jersey Governor Chris Christie slammed Secretary of State John Kerry for remarks the top diplomat made Tuesday about the attacks in Paris and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January. Kerry contrasted the Paris attacks, which he called “indiscriminate,” with the attacks on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, which he argued had “a rationale.”
“His comments were offensive,” Christie told THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “and truly stupid.”
Christie called Kerry the “second most ineffective secretary of state in my lifetime,” but stopped short of calling for him to resign. “I don’t think it matters. The only way things change is with a new president.”
Christie, who also criticized President Obama’s handling of the attacks, wondered if Obama is frustrated that his administration will have to answer for Kerry’s provocative comments. “The president has to be saying himself: Do I need John Kerry to be prancing around the globe saying the truly stupid things he says?”
The controversy erupted when Kerry offered a comparison between last Friday’s carnage in Paris and the previous attack on Charlie Hebdo.
“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.”
Kerry continued: “This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration.”
In the interview, Christie also backed a proposal from Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, who called for a suspension of the revisions to NSA bulk data collection in the USA Freedom Act.
Christie said the programs are crucial to the government’s ability to understand and prevent attacks and argued that the changes were both unnecessary and harmful.
“Yeah, they never should have done it in the first place,” he said, noting he’d been the “loudest voice on the stage” in defense of the programs.
Christie reiterated his call for a moratorium on refugees from Syria, saying that he was making an obvious point based on the assessment of FBI Director James Comey. “We’re taking in refugees where we have no ability to identify them, where much of the territory is occupied by a terrorist group that is recruiting people to conduct attacks on the United States,” Christie said. “The FBI director has said we don’t have the capacity to vet them.”
