A Trump job Chris Christie wanted the most just opened up – By Matt Arcomarco (nj.com) / Nov 7 2018
One of only two jobs in President Donald Trump’s administration that former Gov. Chris Christie said would have prompted him to leave office early just opened up.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions was pushed out as the country’s chief law enforcement officer Wednesday. Sessions told the president in a one-page letter that he was submitting his resignation “at your request.”
Sessions’s job was one Christie coveted.
The former governor said early last year during an interview on Fox News that he likely would have resigned as governor if Trump had offered him the post of U.S. attorney general.
Now, with Sessions out, the question opens up as to whether Christie could be in contention for the position.
Christie did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Christie has long said the president had been “ill-served” by some of his top advisers and has been equally critical of the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller, who was tapped to lead an investigation into potential coordination between the president’s Republican campaign and Russia after Sessions recused himself from the matter.
Trump blamed the decision for opening the door to the appointment of special counsel on Sessions.
“That would have been a hard thing to turn down,” Christie said on Fox News in February 2017.
The other position Christie hoped to get was as Trump’s running mate in 2016. But that was given to former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
“Of course you’re disappointed,” Christie said in reaction to getting passed over for that job on the eve of the Republican National Convention in 2016. “I mean, you know, I don’t ever get into anything that I don’t want to win, and so when you’re not picked, of course you’re disappointed.”
“It didn’t happen,” he added. “That’s fine.”
Sessions had been protected for much of his tenure by the support of Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who had said he would not schedule a confirmation hearing for another attorney general if Trump fired him.
But that support began to fade, with Grassley suggesting over the summer that he might have time for a hearing after all.
And Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, another Judiciary Committee member who once said there’d be “holy hell to pay” if Trump fired Sessions, called the relationship “dysfunctional” and said he thought the president had the right after the midterm to select a new attorney general.
