Chris Christie on Wednesday morning chastised lawmakers for playing politics when it comes to actually fixing immigration policies.
“All they’re doing in Congress is playing politics and worrying about what the next poll is going to say, rather than doing what’s best for our country’s long-term national security,” the former governor of New Jersey told host Laura Ingraham on “The Laura Ingraham Show” on Wednesday morning.
“This is why we have not come to grips with modernizing our laws and making sure that we deal with all the modern challenges we have to all of this. This is crazy, and quite frankly both parties in Congress are to blame.”
President Donald Trump has put immigration at the forefront of his agenda ever since the earliest days of the presidential campaign.
He has tried to crack down on the flow of illegal aliens into this country while promoting policies like merit-based legal immigration.
Congressional Democrats and progressive advocates have pushed back against nearly everything he has tried to do on immigration.
Christie noted that the Right holds some of the blame as well, since Republicans haven’t solved the problem either, even with congressional control since early 2015. Former President Barack Obama was in charge during most of that time, but even so, they still had a couple of years under Trump.
Christie said also could have done more to build pressure to supersede the former president.
“We didn’t do it as a party, so we’re to blame, too,” Christie told Ingraham. “The Democrats, all they want to do is play politics with this. They don’t give a darn about the toll it takes on the people in our country, but also the toll it takes when you’re separating families.”
Christie also commented on former FBI Director James Comey — who thrust himself into the national spotlight when he decided not to recommend the filing of charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the election season in July 2016.
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“I worked with Jim Comey for a long time,” Christie said on Wednesday. “He was my colleague when I was the U.S. attorney in New Jersey. He was the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. He became my boss as deputy attorney general. Jim over the years has changed significantly. What he did, quite frankly, during the 2016 campaign to Hillary Clinton was outrageous.”
Comey said Hillary Clinton’s actions in terms of her use of a private email server were extremely careless — but that those actions did not rise to a criminally prosecutable offense.
He reopened the case for a short time just days before the election when additional emails were discovered on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-N.Y.) laptop.
Comey has since been highly critical of the president and even caught the attention of a congressional investigation looking into decisions made by the FBI and Department of Justice.
Christie also mentioned that he took himself out of consideration for the chief of staff position in the Trump White House because of his commitments as a parent and his desire to spend as much time with his family, especially with a son who will soon be applying to college and beginning that search process.
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