Donald Trump Hires Staff Of ‘Amateurs, Grifters, Weaklings, Convicted Felons,’ Chris Christie Says In New Book
In a new book to be published at the end of this month, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — who in February of 2016, as CNN reported, became the first of Donald Trump’s Republican rivals to drop out of the presidential race and endorse Trump — describes Trump as his “friend,” but has far less kind things to say about the staff members Trump has hired to surround him during his post-election transition and in the White House.
In fact, according to an excerpt published by the news site Axios from Christie’s upcoming memoir Let Me Finish, Christie describes Trump’s staff as “a revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”
Christie has especially unflattering remarks in the book about the Trump aide whom former White House “chief strategist” Steve Bannon referred to only as “the kid” — Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
“In Bannon-speak, the KID is only one person,” Christie writes in Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics. “Not Donald Jr. Not younger son Eric. Not Ivanka or Tiffany. The kid is Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump and the son of the real estate developer Charles Kushner, a man I once sent to prison.”
Christie headed Trump’s presidential transition team before being fired on November 11, 2016, a week after the 2016 election. Christie in the book says that his firing was a “political hit job” orchestrated by Kushner, according to a Guardian account, in retaliation for Christie’s prosecution 12 years earlier of real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s father, on fraud charges.
According to an earlier exposé of the chaotic Trump transition by investigative reporter Michael Lewis in The Guardian, Trump never wanted a transition team at all, despite that fact that one is required by law of all major party presidential nominees.
When Trump learned that Christie had raised “several million dollars” to pay transition team staff, Trump became apoplectic, according to Lewis, cornering Christie in Trump Tower and screaming at him, “You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my f*****g money! What the f*** is this?”
When Christie and Bannon attempted to explain to Trump that the expenditures were required by law, Trump shouted, “F*** the law. I don’t give a f*** about the law. I want my f*****g money!” according to Lewis, and then demanded that Christie shut down the transition team.
