ATLANTA — While Donald Trump claims he canceled a promised press conference to prove that the 2020 election in Georgia had been “stolen” from him because his lawyers will be presenting that information in court filings, his 2024 rival Chris Christie has an alternative theory: “He is scared.”
“He never listens to his lawyers. But he listened this time, didn’t he?” Christie told reporters Saturday after his appearance at a candidates forum. “Why? Because he’s scared. He is scared he’s just a couple of steps away from that jail cell closing behind him.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a JS query about whether Trump was, in fact, worried about potential incarceration.
Trump has been lying about the 2020 election having been stolen from him through fraud since the wee hours of election night, before all the votes had even been counted. Some of his most aggressive efforts to overturn that loss came in Georgia, where he and his staff tried for weeks to pressure state and local elections officials — culminating in an infamous recorded phone call in which he tried to coerce Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to win.
The release of that recording sparked a criminal investigation in Georgia, which has now resulted in a racketeering indictment that could bring Trump decades in a state prison. Trump responded by promising a press conference where he would release a “Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud,” which would require that both the Georgia indictment and a federal indictment based on the same actions be dismissed.
But on Thursday, Trump posted on his personal social network that on the advice of his lawyers, the information would instead be presented in court filings. “Therefore, the News Conference is no longer necessary!” he wrote.
Christie on Saturday morning laughed at that explanation.
“He has no evidence. He is trying to distract from the fact that he was charged in a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] indictment here, two federal indictments, and another state indictment in New York,” he said.
“So that’s why he’s not doing the press conference on Monday. He doesn’t have any evidence, and he’s scared that if he goes out there and shoots off his mouth like he normally does, that he’ll wind up even closer to that jail cell than he is today.”
Christie was among six of the dozen Republican presidential candidates to appear at radio talk show host Erick Erickson’s “Gathering” conference, which took place at a hotel barely eight miles from the Fulton County Jail, where Trump will have to turn himself in to be fingerprinted and photographed no later than Friday.
Georgia’s indictment is Trump’s fourth. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith earlier this month indicted him for conspiring to defraud the United States and to obstruct an official proceeding based on his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. Smith also brought an indictment in South Florida based on Trump’s refusal to turn over top-secret documents he was keeping at his country club there. And Trump was indicted this spring in New York City, where he is accused of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star just ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump is nevertheless, by wide margins, leading his rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
“By Wednesday, he’s going to be out on bail in four different jurisdictions,” Christie said. “When are going to stop thinking that’s normal? When are we going to allow our country to understand again that nominating someone who is out on bail in four jurisdictions is not a winning formula?”