Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie called Donald Trump a “con artist.” The former president has been diverting most of his campaign money to pay his legal fees.
Trump is currently facing a 37-count indictment for willful retention of national security information and conspiracy to obstruct justice. He is also in the midst of a lawsuit for hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign and was just charged with four criminal counts related to the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Trump is the Republican presidential frontrunner and has raised more money than any other candidate. His financial disclosures for the first quarter of the year, however, revealed that more than half of that money has been used to pay his legal fees.
Christie immediately condemned the former president for using voters’ money to fight his criminal charges.
“You really need to have people who are donating $10, $20, $50 to your campaign, pay for your high-priced lawyers for indictments that you’ve all put on yourself by paying off a porn star and holding back classified documents, despite the fact that they’ve been asked for voluntarily for 18 months?” said Christie during an interview with CNN.
“He is a con artist,” Christie continued, “who is conning [voters] out of their money, pretending he wants to be their president. Well, what he wants is a free ride for the legal defense he’s getting for the criminal charges he personally faces.”
Since announcing his bid for the presidency in June, Christie has established himself as Trump’s most vocal Republican critic. Though he is polling significantly behind the former president, Christie’s anti-Trump campaign seems to slowly be attracting voters as Trump continues to accrue criminal charges and further polarize the country.
