Chris Christie Clashes With ‘The View’ Hosts on Impeachment

Wednesday morning on The View, Whoopi Goldberg was out and Chris Christie was in. 

“Did you like that applause? All that adoration?” Joy Behar asked the former New Jersey governor after introducing him. 

“It beats booing, you know,” he replied. “That’s good. I’ll take it.” 

Abby Huntsman warned that it was “just the beginning of the show,” and she was right to be concerned because things got heated very fast when Behar asked Christie to weigh in on the impeachment of his one-time political ally Donald Trump. 

After playing a clip of the president railing against both the FBI and House Democrats at a recent campaign rally, Behar noted that one new poll finds 51 percent of voters oppose impeaching him. “So it looks like his tactics are working,” she said, “because last week it was the opposite.”

“I would say the other side, I think that the Democrats' tactics are failing and that's really the problem,” Christie replied. “He hasn't changed.” Explaining that impeachment is a “political process,” he said he thought House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “was right in the beginning” when she resisted impeaching Trump along partisan lines. “With Clinton, it wasn’t bipartisan, so it didn’t work,” he added. 

“Well, it was a little different with him,” Behar shot back. “He was sleeping with Lewinsky. This guy's sleeping with Putin.” 

Meanwhile, Sunny Hostin came back hard at Christie as well, asking him, “Who can't see that the president of the United States pressured a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political opponent to inure to his benefit, to affect our very democracy? Anyone who calls themselves a patriot is just a liar.” 

Christie replied by saying he doesn’t see any way 20 Republican senators ever vote to remove Trump from office. “It's never going to happen,” he said. “The American public knows it's not going to happen, so what they're asking themselves now, and I think why you see those numbers changing, is because we know it's not going to happen, so why are we going through this?”

“Because we know the Republicans aren’t going to defend the Constitution,” Hostin said in response. When Christie again brought up the Clinton impeachment process, she added, “That's why, Chris, it’s the height of hypocrisy that it’s the same sitting senators that are now still sitting, voted to impeach and convict President Clinton for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, but will not impeach and convict this president.”