Christie Smacks Down Romney Staffers for Trying to Smear Him

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:00 pm

The latest in the jihad the Romney camp issued against enemy combatant Chris Christie is their attempt last night to suggest that Christie snubbed Governor Romney’s request that Christie join him at a Pennsylvania rally.

Obviously, Christie is a little busy right now, but more to the point, Christie said in a press conference today that Romney knew he was off the trail for good due to the storm, and that the Romney people are just trying to issue some payback for Christie praising the president. “So all this other noise, I think, are coming from know-nothing, disgruntled Romney staffers who, you know, don’t like the fact that I said nice things about the President of the United States.”

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Here’s the audio, courtesy of Reuters’ Matthew Keys, who tweeted:

CHRISTIE: Last Sunday night, a week ago Sunday, as the storm was heading toward New Jersey to get a briefing of what I expected… I told Governor Romney at that time that if, if the storm landed as predicted that it was going to be catastrophic to New Jersey and unprecedented.

I said to him, ‘Listen, Mitt, if this storm hits the way I think it’s going to, I’m off the campaign trail from here to Election Day.’ And he said to me, ‘Chris, of course. That’s what you have to do. Do your job, don’t worry about me. I’ll take care of things.’ So all this other noise, I think, are coming from know-nothing, disgruntled Romney staffers who, you know, don’t like the fact that I said nice things about the President of the United States. Well, that’s too bad for them.

I have an agreement with the only person in that whole operation whose held the responsibility that I hold, Mitt Romney, he’s been a governor, he knows. And he told me last Sunday night that he expected no other political travel or help from me over the course of the remaining time between then and the election, if in fact the storm hit the way it was projecting. If it missed us, I would have been happy to go out on the road and help him. But it didn’t.

End transcript.

Governor Romney might want to reign in his staffers. Their Nixonian enemies list approach towards Christie is getting ridiculous.

Since when is praising the President for helping your state a crime? Here’s a clue for the Romney staff: Hurricane Sandy didn’t do half as much damage to your campaign as Hurricane Romney did on its own. As I’ve pointed out before, if Romney had chosen to appear presidential, he had many options open to him — not the least of which was opening his multi-million dollar bank accounts and offering to match his supporters’ contributions to the Red Cross.

Instead, we got the WalMart photo op of Cangate and whining about Chris Christie and Sandy. This is not a big surprise when we look back at the Romney campaign’s record of tone deaf leadership.

Not only will the Romney campaign not be dictated to by fact-checkers, but apparently decency is out as well. The Romney campaign’s decision to issue a threat to Christie days ago was just another low for an already scraping the bottom campaign.

The question here is are the staffers really going rogue, or are they doing their boss’ dirty work while allowing him to play the nice guy to Christie’s face? If they really are going rogue, why doesn’t Romney have any control over them?

What silly pettiness. Kinda makes you want to vote, doesn’t it?

Sarah Jones

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