New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Monday that Donald Trump was wrong when he said that Muslims cheered in the streets of New Jersey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“It didn’t happen and the fact is, people can say anything but the facts are the facts and that didn’t happen in New Jersey that day and hasn’t happened since,” Christie said Monday.
The comments mark a clearer stance from Christie than last week, when he said he couldn’t remember if the Muslims cheered the attacks in the streets. Christie said Monday the press had over-analyzed his comments and that he had always said that the cheering never happened.
“People micro-analyze every word. I said ‘I don’t remember it’ and I wanted to qualify that day not that I thought it happened but just to remind people that that was a very emotional day for me. It was personally emotional, and I was not focused on everything that was going on all across the state. What I was focused on was my wife and my brother who were in lower Manhattan and who I hadn’t heard from for a long, long time. But definitively, I’ve said this a number of times: It didn’t happen,” Christie said Monday.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump continued defending his comments that thousands of Muslims had cheered in the streets of Jersey City after the terrorist attacks and said he would not take back the comment, despite a lack of evidence.
“I’ve heard Jersey City. I’ve heard Paterson. It was 14 years ago,” Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “But I saw it on television, I saw clips, and so did many other people — and many people saw it in person. I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump organization saying, ‘We saw it. There was dancing in the streets.'”