Christie: Kerry ‘needs to get some sleep and shut up’

by Jesse Byrnes - 11/18/15 10:23 AM ET

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie went after Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday for suggesting there was a “rationale” for the attack on the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris earlier this year.

“He needs to get some sleep and shut up. That’s disgraceful,” the New Jersey governor said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.”

{mosads}”These are the kind of weak, mixed signals that this administration sends that helps to really make the American people think there’s no one watching the store, and there isn’t,” Christie added.

Kerry, while speaking to staff and their families at the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Tuesday, said “there’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that.”

“There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that,” Kerry said.

He then described Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris as “indiscriminate,” saying there were meant “to attack everything that we do stand for.”

Islamic militants killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo office in January, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed.

Last week’s attacks in Paris left 129 dead and hundreds more wounded.

State Department spokesman John Kirby insisted Tuesday night that Kerry “didn’t justify” the Hebdo attacks with his remarks but “simply explained how terrorists tried to.”

“As he said at time, it was a cowardly & despicable act,” Kirby tweeted.

This report was updated at 11:26 a.m.

Tags Charlie Hebdo Chris Christie ISIS John Kerry