Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is convinced Donald Trump took White House documents to stash at his home as “trophies” to soothe his wounded ego after losing the presidential election.
“He wanted to keep these documents as a trophy; that’s what they were more than anything else,” Christie told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday. “He walks around and says, ‘Look, I got this, I’ve got this classified document or that.’”
Trump still “can’t believe he’s not president,” Christie explained. “He needs to display to everybody down at Mar-a-Lago, or up in Bedminster … that he still has some of those trappings: the replica Resolute Desk [from the Oval Office] in Mar-a-Lago and all the rest of those things. [They’re] assuaging his disappointment and his disbelief that he’s not the president anymore,” Christie explained.
Despite Trump’s motivation for taking the files, an employee told the FBI that he deliberately tried to keep them hidden, according to media reports.
The staffer, identified by The Washington Post as Walt Nauta, reportedly told investigators that Trump told him to transfer boxes of documents to other locations at the Mar-a-Lago compound after the Justice Department issued a subpoena in May for missing government files. Nauta, who became a personal aide to the former president in Florida after serving as a military valet in the Trump White House, was later shown on surveillance apparently carrying out Trump’s orders.
Asked if he considered that evidence of obstruction of justice, Christie, a former prosecutor, responded with an emphatic “yes.”
Months after the FBI confiscated several boxes of official documents, including classified and top secret information, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, observers are still trying to figure out his motive for taking files that were supposed to be handed over to the National Archives.
Some have speculated Trump may have planned to sell documents or use them as blackmail or some other kind of “leverage,” as Stephanopoulus suggested.
