Chris Christie doesn’t think that President Trump can turn it off.
The former New Jersey governor and Trump-ally told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the president wouldn’t survive an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller because he couldn’t snap out of salesman mode.
“One of the things that makes the president who he is that he’s a salesman, and salesmen at times tend to be hyperbolic,” Christie said on Sunday. “That’s OK when you’re working on Congress. It is not OK when you’re sitting talking to federal agents because, 18 U.S.C. 1001 is false statements to federal agents, that’s a crime, that can send you to jail.”
And Christie is right.
Trump is good on stage but bad in a deposition. A review of a 2007 deposition called after the businessman sued Bloomberg reporter Timothy O’Brien for libel showed the president repeatedly struggling to reconcile his exaggerations with hard facts (he later lost). Later what Christie generously describes as hyperbole would carry Trump to the top of the Republican field and finally past Hillary Clinton.
Unlike voters, who took Trump seriously but not literally, Mueller would take Trump both seriously and literally. The embellishment, conflation, and exaggerations that supporters so often dismiss, federal prosecutors would not. Thus, Trump does not possess the disposition needed to avoid making false statements to the FBI, Christie concludes, and so he should not go in under oath. It’s hard to disagree with that legal counsel.
