Chris Christie Interview Excerpts: The Governor on Trump, the Transition and His Record

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/us/politics/chris-christie-interview-excerpts-.html

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Weeks before the end of his second term, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey gave a two-hour interview to The New York Times on a wide range of subjects, including President Trump and his transition to the White House and where Mr. Christie excelled (and fell short) in his own state. Here are excerpts from the interview.

“I think what I did here in 2010 gave Scott Walker permission to do what he did in 2011, and gave him the political courage to do what he did. And, so I think that the biggest long-term accomplishment was to tell people not only is it O.K. to have this conversation, but we have to have it.

“Now, what do I wish I would have done more of? I wish they had done more of what I asked them to do. We accomplished a lot — we got rid of cost of living adjustments. We got rid of free health benefits, so now people pay for a portion of their health benefits, sliding scale based on salary. All those things are helping. We’ve contributed much more than any other administration has to the pension, so by the time I’m done in eight years, I would have put in $8.8 billion, which is nearly three times more than the past five governors combined. So we’ve done things that have both changed the benefits and we’ve made the state step up more than they ever have before.”

“Once it became clear that the president was going to be the nominee, Jeff [Sessions] and I made an agreement amongst ourselves, probably in like May or June of ‘16, that the best way for this to not appear to anybody’s agenda other than the president, was to have a blue-state governor and a red-state United States senator agree on everything.”

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“So that if Jeff Sessions and Chris Christie agreed on a recommendation, you knew it was a recommendation that was in the best interest of the candidate, devoid of any type of ideological or political or personal bias or agenda. Right. So Jeff and I agreed in the beginning that that’s the way we would run things. And that’s why Rich Bagger was the executive director of the transition and Rick Dearborn was the deputy executive director. Right. So at the staff level Rick reported to Rich, but they worked together. And when they would make recommendations to me and Jeff, it had to be both of them agreeing. So at the staff level, Rich and Rick agreed on stuff that they would raise to the level of me and Jeff. And then once a week, every week, Jeff and I would meet or have a conference call depending on where we were on Friday.”

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“It depends on the day but some of them would be short, if we don’t have a lot of things to approve, they’d be maybe 20 or 25 minutes. But some of them would be an hour, an hour and a half, if there’s lots of things. And what those calls were about was to set the agenda for the Monday meeting with the executive committee. And the executive committee varied from time to time. The constants on the exact committee were the [Trump] children.”

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“The process was very organized. This was not haphazard in any way. And every Monday, certainly from before the convention, like, let’s say the month or so before the convention, to literally eight days before the election. That group met every Monday at Trump Tower. And if people were on the road, they would call in. But I don’t remember them ever getting canceled. It was every Monday, and Bagger would send to these committee members by Friday close of business the agenda for the meeting, the resumes that the people were proposing hiring, and any other information that they needed to be able to make decisions.”

“Seventy-five percent.”

“I’m more optimistic now than I was, let’s say three months ago. Because I think they’ve now given it to Kellyanne [Conway] to do. And there is now the responsible party at the White House that’s coordinating everything and the cabinet now knows that.”

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“I think we had some impediments. Secretary Price was an impediment, right?”

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“He did not like the idea of the commission, he was opposed to the commission being established in the first place.”

“My approach from the beginning was, my first election was about Jon Corzine. It wasn’t about me. I was just the acceptable alternative to the person they have rejected.”

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To the president, “I said, ‘Now the next four years are about you.’ And so his re-elect will be about you. Not about your challenger. It’ll be about you.”

“So first off, this idea that, ‘Oh, New Jersey Transit has been starved’ — we had one big accident with, tragically, one person died because a guy had sleep apnea. O.K. And then this becomes like New Jersey Transit is falling apart. Before that you never heard anything about New Jersey Transit falling apart. Pre- that accident, you go back and look at the clips, there was not any big discussion about New Jersey Transit being in some crisis. It’s not in a crisis. Now, can it be improved? Yes. But we’re on track to get positive train control in by the federal deadline of December 18. And it’s already fully funded. The new governor’s not going to have put any new money into P.T.C. unless he wants to accelerate it. If he wants to accelerate it getting in before December 18 he could put more money in, I guess, and get it done a little more quickly. But he doesn’t need to.”

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“The key to infrastructure in New Jersey is going to be getting the Gateway tunnel done. I mean, and that’s nothing to do with New Jersey Transit. I mean, it’s going to be New York, New Jersey and the feds getting together in an equitable way which Governor Cuomo now has agreed on. We agreed on it with the Obama administration and the Trump administration has not come forward yet on it.”

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“My wife, up until about four years ago, took New Jersey Transit every day for 25 years, and she would complain to me all the time, no matter what. ‘Oh it’s too crowded, it’s too hot in the summer, in the winter it’s too cold.’ I mean, meet a commuter who likes to commute? Like someone who says, ‘Oh my commuting experience is so pleasant.’”

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“I think what the new governor will find when he comes in, especially with $2 billion a year being spent on infrastructure, is that he is going to have plenty of money available to him to do the things that he may want to do. And if that improves things, great. But the idea that somehow, people can’t get into New York now — like the ‘summer of hell’— I wanted to kill Cuomo when he said that. It was, seriously, it was one of the dumbest things. And you know, Andrew and I have a great relationship, we’ve worked really well for seven years, but when he said that, I called him, I said, ‘What are you doing? That’s all we’re going to hear now.’”

“I think that Jim Comey was wrong in this respect. Put aside the merits of whether Hillary committed a crime or she didn’t. He should have never been the one making that decision and announcing it. And once he did, he made the F.B.I. political.”

“The sun will come up. O.K.? I mean because, he is, the president is an outspoken, direct, blunt guy. So O.K., he’s going to say those things, but in the end, just keep doing your job and doing it well.”

“I don’t know what legal advice the president is getting or not getting. But I would say that any legal advice that tries to predict when a prosecutor’s investigation is going to end is just kind of shooting in the dark.”

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“The president, quite frankly, doesn’t get enough credit for the fact that he really has been very fair to Mueller. And you hear all this speculation about things. I will tell you this, I talk to the president fairly frequently, he has never even once even hinted to me about firing Bob Mueller. Never. Never. I think it’s the exact opposite. I think the president just would like him to get the job done.”

“It was bad and stupid. And I was up by 30 points. The idea that like — the thing that’s always bugged me about this, amongst other things, is that the idea that I would care for five seconds about whether or not I had the endorsement of the mayor of Fort Lee is laughable. Both on the basis of the fact that I didn’t even know who the mayor of Fort Lee was, and secondly, because Fort Lee is a town that has no political significance at all. It’s a little town. I don’t remember how many voters there are in Fort Lee. But not a lot.

“It’s insulting to me that people think I would participate in something like that. And I think the entire thing was stupid and ridiculous. And it’s inexplicable to me what they were thinking.”

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“It was covered as if I was already the nominee or the president. I mean every night, every night, every night, I mean there’s been studies that were done that were given to us about the amount of the coverage that dwarfed like the I.R.S. scandal in the Obama administration by like 12-to-1, in terms of the amount of time in the evening news.”

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“There’s nothing you can do. And that’s the switch. Telling it like it is and my personality still works with the people in this state. It just didn’t work for me as much as it did before because some of them, mostly Democrats and some middle-of-the-road independents, abandoned me because it confirmed for them their fear about me. And when that happens, that’s bad.”

“It’s significant, but I think there’s ways we can fight back against it, in this sense. We should right now make property taxes fully deductible on state income taxes. It will only cost about $150-170 million dollars in the state budget, and we should do it right now, because if we don’t, it will affect the real estate market in the state.”

“I got home about 4:30 a.m. And Mary Pat, who is the soundest sleeper I’ve ever met in my life, who can sleep through anything, was straight up in bed waiting for me. And she looked at me and said, ‘Are we going to Washington?’ And I said, I really don’t know, but get ready.

“So I think both of our expectations that moment was that he would probably offer me something that I was willing to leave office to do. I didn’t know what exactly, but I figured there was probably something that he was going to offer me that I would say, ‘All right, it’s important enough for me to leave the last year.’ But in the end he never did. Now two days later, I was fired as the chairman of the transition. And I got offered a bunch of stuff in the month of December and in the month of February that I didn’t take because I didn’t think it was important enough for me to leave the job.”