Christie says he was unable to reach Trump on Jan. 6

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) revealed in a new interview that despite several attempts, he was unable to reach then-President Trump as rioters were storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Christie told Mike Allen during an interview for “Axios on HBO” that he tried calling Trump through three different channels on Jan. 6, but all were unsuccessful.

He said he wanted to “give him advice on what I thought he needed to be doing to stop the violence.”

“I called Kellyanne Conway first. And I said to her: ‘Have you spoken to him?’ And she said she had not. And she said: ‘I think we both need to call him.’ And I said: ‘Absolutely.’ So I then called the president’s secretary. … Couldn’t get through. I then called his body guy. Didn’t pick up. I then called the president’s cellphone, and he didn’t pick up,” Christie told Allen.

The former New Jersey governor said he was “desperate to try to get in touch with” Trump to try and stop the violence at the Capitol, which he foresaw as becoming “a stain on his presidency.”

Christie said that he later took to the airwaves to say publicly what he would have told the president privately.

“I felt like what was happening was awful and was going to be a stain on his presidency, and I wanted him to be the guy to stand up and stop it. But he didn’t take the call, and so I said what I would have said to him privately on the air on ABC,” Christie said.

During an appearance days later on ABC’s “This Week,” Christie, a contributor at the network, said Trump’s actions before his supporters stormed the Capitol amounted to an impeachable offense.

“What we had was an incitement to riot at the United States Capitol. We had people killed, and to me there’s not a whole lot of question here,” Christie added.

It is not clear, however, if those are the comments he was referring to in conversation with Allen.

Christie was a close ally of Trump, supporting him through his 2016 and 2020 campaigns and his time in the White House. That relationship, however, started to crack when Christie caught COVID-19 after attending debate preparation sessions at the White House, which led to a weeklong hospital stay.

The former governor is now mulling his own presidential campaign, after previously running in 2016, and has made clear that he would not take his cues from Trump.

Christie previously said he would not wait to see if Trump runs for reelection in 2024 before making his own plans for the next presidential election cycle.

He doubled down on those remarks in conversation with Allen, arguing that “people who say that they will defer to Donald Trump have disqualified themselves from being president.”

“You shouldn’t defer to anyone if you believe you’re the best person,” he added.

Christie is out with a new book, “Republican Rescue,” on Tuesday.