Chris Christie’s New Book Details the “Political Hit Job” That Shut Him Out of Team Trump

I really wondered when and how former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s angst over how he was dismissed from Team Trump would manifest.

It’s been over two years, but I guess I finally have my answer.

Christie is the latest to release a book, detailing his role in the campaign of Donald Trump.

The book, to be titled “Let Me Finish,” is due to be released on January 29, and takes direct and brutal aim at Trump son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner.

For those who aren’t aware of the history there, Christie, while serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey (around a decade ago) led the case against Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, for witness tampering.

Kushner, the elder, was a particularly noxious character. He was already a dirty character, but he took it to a new level, in order to silence his sister and her husband.

The elder Kushner hired a sex worker to seduce his brother-in-law Bill Schulder, then filmed them having sex in a motel and sent the tape to his own sister, Esther. The bizarre plot was an attempt to blackmail the Schulders into keeping their silence about Bill’s knowledge of Charles’s fraudulent activities.

Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 charges and served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama.

So when Christie, the man who was instrumental in getting his dad locked away joined the Trump team, you had to know Prince Jared would have the long knives out.

According to what Christie writes, Kushner carried out a political hit job, not only having him ousted as the chairman of his father-in-law’s 2016 transition team, but also sabotaging any further goals he may have had for position with the Trump administration.

Christie writes that it was former Trump adviser and walking lesion, Steve Bannon, who confirmed his suspicions.

As Bannon was carrying out the firing, at Trump Tower in New York, Christie forced him to tell him who was really behind the dismissal by threatening to go to the media and point the finger at Bannon instead.

“Steve Bannon … made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago.”

“The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon confessed at Christie’s dismissal.

Along the way in the book, Christie points out that no one who has written about the Trump administration, to date, is as familiar with Trump, or has been for as long as he has, nor were they present in the room when so many of the events that have been written about went down. He was, he claims.

Speaking of in the room:

In one of the most visceral passages of the book, Christie recounts for the first time how Jared Kushner badmouthed him to Trump in April 2016, pleading with his father-in-law not to make Christie transition chairman. Remarkably, he did so while Christie was in the room.

“He implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn’t state one fact to back that up,” Christie writes. “Just a lot of feelings – very raw feelings that had been simmering for a dozen years.”

Wow. A Trump in-law stressing over ethics. That’s… something.

And it absolutely was, according to Christie, because of his dad.

Kushner went on to tell Trump that it wasn’t fair his father spent so long in prison. He insisted the sex tape and blackmailing was a family matter that should have been kept away from federal authorities: “This was a family matter, a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis.”

And there was no collusion.

For some bizarre reason, Trump thought proposing that Christie, Jared, and his father, Charles Kushner all sit down for dinner together, in order to hash it out was a good idea.

Jared refused and Christie was glad he did.

And if you think Kushner was the only target of Christie, think again.

Trump’s first national security adviser, retired general Michael Flynn caught it pretty hard, as well.

In one of the book’s more memorable put-downs, Flynn is dubbed “the Russian lackey and future federal felon”. Christie also calls the former general “a train wreck from beginning to end … a slow-motion car crash”.

Ouch.

As it is, Flynn has been so helpful with providing information to the Mueller team, apparently, they’re recommending no jail time, so he may escape that “federal felon” tag.

Christie also talks about his efforts to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, before the 2016 campaign.

Yeah. That didn’t work out, and he suspects the Kushner fingerprints were on that one, as well – both Jared’s and those of Trump’s favored child, Ivanka.

An anonymous “high-ranking Trump staffer” is depicted calling to warn that “the family is very upset that he says it will be you”. A mollifying call from son Eric Trump follows but that is as close as Christie gets. Trump chooses ultra-conservative Indiana politician, Mike Pence, after a mystifying wait. Christie repeatedly says he was not disappointed.

Seriously. Christie was ready for something. ANYTHING!

US attorney general, the other role Christie would have accepted, also eluded him. As with most appointments he is scathing about the man who got the job, Jeff Sessions, whom he calls “not-ready-for-prime-time” and whose recusal from the Russia investigation he blames for its ever-growing scale. Trump did apparently offer Christie “special assistant to the president in the White House”, which he turned down, prompting from the president-elect “an expression that said maybe he hadn’t heard me right”.

Surely there’s something he could do, right?

Christie would have taken chair of the Republican National Committee and seemed poised to get it. But according to Christie, once again Trump’s family worked against him. In a near-comic scene, Reince Priebus, the RNC chair who would become Trump’s first chief of staff, offers him role after role in a frantic attempt to fulfil the directive from Trump to “make Chris happy”. One by one, Christie turns down labor secretary, homeland security secretary and ambassadorships in Rome and the Vatican.

I’m surprised Trump cared about making Christie happy. He used him like an errand boy and made him the butt of jokes throughout the campaign.

He even suggested Christie wear a long tie, in order to make himself appear slimmer.

At least we now understand the fashion mystery behind Trump’s ridiculously oversized neckwear.

Christie doesn’t get into a lot about the ongoing Russia probe, but he does express some thoughts.

For starters, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was a sign of “profound inexperience.”

Also in regards to Jared Kushner’s faulty instincts:

He does, however, contend that Kushner misjudged two Russia-related firings: that of Flynn in February 2017 and most famously that of the FBI director James Comey in May the same year. According to Christie, Kushner thought firing Flynn would end talk of links between the Trump campaign and Russia – it did not – and that firing Comey would not provoke “an enormous sh*t-storm” in Washington. It did.

“Again,” Christie writes, having detailed conversations with Kushner in which he was acting in an informal capacity, “the president was ill served by poor advice.”

What Christie doesn’t do in this book is attack President Trump. In fact, he’s rather generous with the character of Trump, only blaming him for surrounding himself with bad people.

I guess once a toady, always a toady, and with the turnover in the Trump White House, it’s highly possible Christie may get a position, yet.