New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie slammed the media Thursday for giving Hillary Clinton leeway in her State Department email scandal, compared to how much scrutiny he faced over “Bridgegate.”
“Has there been coverage of the email situation with the secretary, absolutely. But the intensity of the coverage, and the relentlessness of the coverage is different. And that’s where the bias is revealed,” Christie said on CNBC Thursday, calling the reporting of his involvement in the scandal, in which he has not been directly implicated, a “rush to judgment.”
“Fifteen months later … everything that I said the day after that story broke, everything I said, has proven out to be true after three different investigations,” he said.
Federal authorities charged three Christie allies this month, while Christie maintains his innocence in the shutting down of lanes on the George Washington Bridge, which crosses the Hudson River. The event was found to be political retaliation toward the mayor of Fort Lee.
It was recently revealed that Hillary Clinton never had an official government email as secretary of state — instead her email address was on a private server. Those business-related emails are slowly being released to the public by the State Department, though her confessed deletion of thousands of emails she deemed as personal has caused an uproar.
“If I had come out the day after the ‘Bridgegate’ thing was announced and said, ‘By the way, um, all my emails are on a private server, and I deleted a whole bunch of them and destroyed the server and you have to take my word for it, the emails had nothing to do with the bridge stuff,’ can you only imagine what the reaction would have been?” Christie asked, adding, “Can you imagine if it were me who deleted my emails?”
Christie is mulling a run for the 2016 Republican presidential ticket, while Clinton has already launched her campaign for the Democratic nomination.
