Chris Christie says Trump is giving free rein to white-collar criminals
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday that President Donald Trump's pardons are 'eliminating' the idea that there is such a thing as white-collar crime.
'He's saying it doesn't exist, anything goes,' Christie said to host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's 'This Week.'
Christie spoke in particular about the recent pardon of Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had been convicted of stealing millions from his employees. 'Paul Walczak is an entrepreneur targeted by the Biden administration over his family's conservative politics,' White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement to Axios about the pardon.
Christie said Sunday that Walczak's mother 'was a million-dollar donor/fundraiser for Trump. And this guy stole, George, 10 million dollars in payroll taxes. The money that his employees give to him to pay their payroll taxes, he stole that money.'
The former New Jersey governor is certainly not a fan of Trump, having run against him in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016 and 2024. But before he was elected governor in 2009, Christie served as a U.S. attorney. Among those he prosecuted during that time was Charles Kushner, father of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and now Trump's ambassador to France.
Many but by no means all of Trump's recent pardons and commutations have been in cases of fraud. Speaking on ABC alongside 'The Haves and Have-Yachts' author Evan Osnos, Christie divvied up Trump's pardons into subgroups.
'You know, he's got categories of pardons,' he said. 'You know, you got the pay-to-play pardons. You've got the reality-TV-stars-turned-supporters. And then you've got the folks out there who are just victims of what he calls weaponization of the Justice Department.
'But all of them,' Christie added 'have one thing in common, which is you've got to be whole hog for Donald Trump. Never before we have — have we seen a president who makes it a gate to getting to a pardon to be a political supporter of his, a vocal current political supporter.'
Trump's other recent pardons and commutations include Todd and Julie Chrisley, whose daughter spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024; Jason Galanis and Devon Archer, who had testified in House GOP inquiries into the conduct of Hunter Biden; former Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins; former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland; former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.); and Larry Hoover, a Chicago drug kingpin who founded the Gangster Disciples.
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