Gaetz mocks Chris Christie’s weight after he defended FBI’s Wray

Rep. Matt Gaetz ripped Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday for praising FBI Director Christopher Wray — and suggesting that GOP lawmakers were grandstanding during a congressional hearing in order to raise funds for their campaigns. 

“I want to respond to something that Chris Christie said on Fox News earlier today,” Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“He said that Christopher Wray had delivered extraordinary results. The problem is they’re just extraordinarily awful. And, like, Chris Christie criticized us for engaging in fundraising theater during this committee, and I’m not going to take my notes on fundraising from a guy who was a lobbyist and was snout down in the lobbyist financial money laundering situation when he was raising money from them as governor of New Jersey.

“So, I’m more likely to take, like, Chris Christie’s exercise plan that I am his fundraising strategy,” Gaetz said in an apparent shot at the former governor’s weight.

Christie, who is averaging 2.6% support in the GOP presidential primary race, criticized Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee for their grilling of Wray during a fiery hearing on Wednesday, deriding some of their questioning as being performative. 

“Jim Comey and Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch drastically harmed the Department of Justice and the FBI. And Chris Wray has now spent years fixing that,” Christie said on Fox News, praising the FBI director.  

“What you saw today, I think was an animated and combative FBI director who’s defending the men and women who work for him every day and do a great job and protect us from domestic terrorism, from international terrorism and from these drug cartels and are helping state and local law enforcement every day with their things,” he added.

“So yeah, I think Chris Wray has done a very good job. And I think, look, a lot of stuff you see today is theater, they’re people trying to raise money for campaigns, it doesn’t mean there aren’t problems at the FBI, there are, but I believe Chris is a guy who can get it fixed and he’s fixed a lot of them already,” Christie argued. 

Gaetz lit into Wray during his questioning Wednesday, accusing the FBI director of seeming “deeply uncurious“ and “almost suspiciously uncurious” about a July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message in which first son Hunter Biden demanded money from a Chinese business associate.

“Are you protecting the Bidens?” the Florida Republican asked Wray at one point. 

To which Wray responded, “Absolutely not.”