New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on Sunday that the meeting set up last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian attorney was “not something that should have happened.”
“The fact of the matter, as I said before, this meeting was ill-advised,” Christie said on CNN, adding that “everybody in retrospect knows this was a bad idea.”
He said that had Trump Jr. reached out to Don McGahn, who served as counsel to Trump’s campaign and is now serving in the White House, he would have advised against the meeting.
The meeting in question took place in the summer of 2016, and involved people affiliated with the Trump campaign, including Jared Kusher, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser. Emails revealed last month that show it was set up with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton, though Trump Jr. claims that the meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “went nowhere” on that front. He also said his father, then a presidential candidate, had no knowledge of the meeting.
Though there has been conflicting statements about what Trump knew, and when, by the White House and Trump’s legal team, Christie stressed that people should not get ahead of themselves about possible collusion with the Russian government.
“My view on this is this is why we have people looking into it. It’s not for us to make conclusions beforehand,” he said. “It’s to let [special counsel] Bob Mueller and his team do the investigation and then let’s have the facts come out. I think everyone will be better served by that.”
