Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie visited the White House yesterday amid reports that President Trump is considering him for attorney general. Although Christie technically has the qualifications for the job, choosing him as attorney general would be a political mistake.
Before Christie spent one term as one of the country’s most popular governors and another term as its least popular governor, he served as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey for six years. Christie doubled the size of New Jersey’s anti-corruption unit, convicted literal slave-owners, dozens of gang members, and New Jersey’s top political bosses — including Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, a senior adviser to the president.
Despite Christie’s successful first term as governor of New Jersey, his political career went up in flames. His appointees faced prison time for corruption and he faltered through Bridge-gate and Beach-gate. With his potential shot in New Jersey, Christie bet his political future on his sycophantic relationship with Trump, only to find himself kicked to the curb by Vice President Pence and, of course, Jared Kushner.
Now it seems that Christie has finagled his way back into the president’s good graces. And Christie would be a great pick to run the Department of Justice if we want Eric Holder 2.0.
Jeff Sessions is far more politically Trumpy, for lack of a better term, than Christie. Sessions was essentially one of the founding fathers of ideological Trumpism, with his heavy focus on trade protectionism, illegal immigration, and tackling gang violence and drugs. However, as an attorney general, Sessions practiced more ideological loyalty to Trump’s agenda than personal loyalty to Trump himself.
That was a good thing. Although the Department of Justice is not legally required to maintain independence from the White House, and although the attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, Republicans in particular have come to expect a level of objectivity from the nation’s top law enforcement agency. Based on Christie’s recent actions, both as governor and as a Trump lackey, it seems likely that he would be an Attorney General more in the mold of Holder — who, as a reminder, was held in contempt of Congress for covering up for former President Barack Obama during the “Fast and Furious” scandal — than of Sessions’ relative distance from the president.
Furthermore, Christie’s eternal feud with Jared Kushner would blow away the one clear silver lining of terminating Sessions: enacting criminal justice reform. Whereas Sessions vehemently opposed key tenets of much-needed criminal justice and prison reform, his replacement should not. Christie has historically been far more politically moderate than Sessions, but he is unlikely to make Jared’s dreams of prison reform pass through the DOJ.
Christie claims that he and Jared Kushner have gotten over their longstanding brawl, but he’s also been willing to take public digs at the first son-in-law since. The disaster of Bridgegate and Christie’s obvious willingness to use political capital to go after his foes calls into question his ability to be an objective arbiter of the law.
It’s Trump’s DOJ. He can do what he wants as long as the Senate consents. But if Trump chooses Christie and conservatives applaud it, let’s never pretend again to care about the corruption and collusion of the DOJ under Democrats.
