Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” accused President Donald Trump of engaging in “Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment.”
Christie said, “He and his family believe they are entitled to this. This is an entitlement to them. They believe, when they came back and won this election the second time, that gave them license. That the American people gave them license to essentially go and take whatever they could take over this period of time. And, quite frankly, you know, when you look at the scale of this, here’s another thing, apparently, that Donald Trump learned from Vladimir Putin during his first term. This is Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment.”
He added, “I mean there’s a difference between, obviously, as you know, between the individual ethics laws, which do not apply to him, but the emoluments clause, when you look at the plane. And what I think will start to hurt him more is that he says things that turn out to not be true. Oh, the plane is a gift. It won’t cost us anything. Well, no, it costs us hundreds of millions of dollars to get it up to Air Force One level of operation. Every time he says one of those things, the ballroom won’t cost anybody anything. Now we’re talking about them wanting to move a billion dollars to work on the ballroom. The American people are starting to catch up to this. You can feel it.”
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