Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Sunday morning that President Trump will regret not invoking executive or attorney client privilege in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into any ties between Trump campaign and Russia.
“You never waive that. Absolutely not,” Christie said on ABC’s “This Week.” “This shows what a C-level legal team the president had in Ty Cobb and John Dowd.”
{mosads}
“This is not in the president’s interest. It wasn’t in the president’s interest,” he continued.
“It’s bad legal advice. Bad lawyering,” Christie concluded.
Christie also said that the decision to waive privilege resulted in White House counsel Donald McGahn’s cooperation with Mueller’s investigation.
“It put Don McGahn in an impossible situation,” Christie said. “Because once you waive that privilege and turn over all those documents, Don McGahn has no choice then but to go in and answer everything, every question they can ask him.”
The New York Times on Saturday broke the news of McGahn’s cooperation with the Mueller probe. The newspaper reported that McGahn began working with Mueller because Trump’s initial legal team decided to cooperate fully with Mueller because the president purportedly had nothing to hide.
McGahn then continued cooperating out of a fear that Trump might be setting him up to take the fall on an obstruction of justice charge, according to the Times.
After the news broke, the president tweeted out that he allowed McGahn to work with Mueller as part of the original decision to cooperate fully with the probe.
“I have nothing to hide,” Trump wrote in another tweet on the issue Sunday, calling the Times’s piece “Fake” and the paper “failing.”
The president’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, echoed Trump’s comments Sunday morning, saying McGahn “was a strong witness for the president.”