Chris Christie claims it’s ‘undeniable’ he got Covid from Trump and White House hid positive test

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tore into Donald Trump and his staff in a recent interview, claiming it’s “undeniable” the former president gave him a serious case of Covid in 2020 while he was helping Mr Trump prepare for the presidential debates.

“We knew everybody in the room except for the president was getting tested every day. We didn’t know what the president’s testing regimen was,” Mr Christie told PBS’s Firing Line on Thursday, adding, “Trump should have told all of us.”

Mr Christie, who has had an alternatively critical and friendly relationship with Mr Trump, also claimed that the president’s chief of staff Mark Meadows hid Mr Trump’s positive diagnosis for days, putting numerous people at risk, only revealing who knew what and when in a recent political memoir.

In Mr Meadows’s new book, The Chief’s Chief, he claims the president tested positive for Covid on 26 September, six days before he announced it to the public and a week before Mr Christie tested positive himself, a case of coronavirus that sent the former governor to the intensive care unit for a week.

“He had an obligation to tell us … I would’ve worn a mask if I knew that,” Mr Christie said in the interview. “So if Mark Meadows knew that somebody that I was sitting across from for four days had popped a positive test, he as the White House chief of staff, putting aside the president for a second – obviously, the president is my friend – he should’ve looked at me and told me that … But I think what’s less obvious is that Mark Meadows saved this for his book. He saved it for a book.” The former White House chief of staff didn’t even tell Mr Christie about the positive test timeline when he was in the hospital, he claims.

The Independent has reached out to Mr Trump and Mr Meadows for comment.

Mr Trump, however, did place a call to Mr Christie – to see if he would be blamed for the Covid diagnosis, the former governor claims in a new book of his own.

“Are you gonna say you got it from me?” he quotes the president as saying.

The New Jersey leader has been positioning himself in recent weeks as a prominent post-Trump voice in the party, if such a thing is possible. He has said the former president is trying to “instil fear” in fellow Republicans about admitting the truth of the 2020 election.

Mr Christie has spent recent weeks urging the GOP to move on from its obsession with the 2020 election and the baseless claim that election fraud stole a rightful Trump victory.

“If [Trump] wants to be a positive force in the future, he’s got to let this other stuff go. If he doesn’t, I don’t think he can be,” Mr Christie told The New York Times on Saturday.

Chris Christie and Donald Trump have a somewhat tortured relationship, often becoming allies around election seasons before the two brash East Coast-ers find themselves butting heads. Mr Christie served as the head of the Trump transition team, then was fired, then led the Trump administration opioid epidemic committee, and has since pivoted to attacking Trump’s election lies.