New Jersey governor and Donald Trump surrogate Chris Christie called Hillary Clinton “a disgrace” after she connected recent police shootings to “systematic racism” — hours after the GOP nominee said he was “very troubled” by a recent incident in Oklahoma.
“She’s a disgrace. She’s a disgrace and those comments are a disgrace,” Christie said Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “It’s typical of Hillary Clinton. She knows nothing but the mouth never stops.”
Trump, however, has also displayed a tendency to speak about events before all the facts are made clear. He notably called the explosion in New York City over the weekend a “bomb” 30 minutes after the incident, despite a lack of official confirmation.
Ingraham played comments Clinton made Tuesday on “The Steve Harvey Show” following the shooting of Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed black man shot dead by police in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“And we’ve got to tackle systemic racism — this horrible shooting again,” Clinton said. “How many times do we have to see this in our country? In Tulsa, an unarmed man with his hands in the air? I mean, this is just unbearable, and it needs to be intolerable. And so maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, look, this is not who we are.”
Trump, speaking Wednesday in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, at a minority voter outreach event, also expressed concern about the shooting.
“I must tell you, I watched the shooting, in particular in Tulsa, and that man was hands up, that man went to the car — hands up — put his hand on the car. To me, it looked like he did everything you’re supposed to do,” Trump said. “And he looked like a really good man — and maybe I’m a little clouded because I saw his family talking about him after the fact … but he looked like somebody who was doing what they were asking him to do.”
Christie — speaking hours after Clinton condemned the shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina — said the former secretary of state doesn’t know enough about policing to draw any conclusions.
“The fact is she has no idea what happened in North Carolina,” he said. “The same way, as you very aptly pointed out Laura, people jumped to conclusions in Ferguson, which caused riot conditions in Ferguson, because of politicians dumping gasoline on a fire.”
The Clinton campaign has said she hopes to develop national best practices for police to help them manage situations like those in Tulsa and Charlotte. But Christie, a former federal prosecutor, said Clinton had “no experience in law enforcement except for being interviewed by them.”
“I’m just appalled, and as someone who spent seven years in law enforcement, she’s exactly the kind of politician that law enforcement loathes, loathes her,” Christie added. “Because she jumps to conclusions for political gain and doesn’t care what careers or lives she ruins in the process.”