New Jersey governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie said Secretary of State John Kerry needs “to get some sleep and shut up” after Kerry claimed there was a “rationale” for the January Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
Kerry came under fire for suggesting that the attack on the satirical newspaper was in a way more rational than the terrorist attacks that occurred Friday in Paris that killed at least 120 people.
{mosads}”There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry said Tuesday at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy — not a legitimacy — but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this or that.’
“This Friday, was absolutely indiscriminate,” he continued. “It was to terrorize people and attack everything we do stand for.”
Speaking on Fox News’s “America’s newsroom,” Christie said the secretary of State should be ashamed for the comments.
“He needs to get some sleep and shut up,” Christie said. “That’s disgraceful, for the secretary of State of the United States to stand up and say there’s some ‘rationale’ for what happened in January? These are the kind of the weak, mixed signals that this administration sends that helps to really make the American people think that there’s no one watching the store, and there isn’t.”
State Department Spokesperson John Kirby addressed Kerry’s remarks Tuesday night on Twitter, and said Kerry meant that it was the terrorists’ rationale for attacking the newspaper.
“John Kerry didn’t justify the Hebdo attacks, simply explained how terrorists tried to,” Kirby tweeted. “It was cowardly & despicable act.”
Christie also focused his backlash on President Obama, saying he didn’t effectively enforce a “red line” or a “no fly zone” in Syria, which Christie said forced the Syrian refugees to leave their own country.
“This is the same president who’s sitting around saying that somehow it’s everyone else’s fault,” Christie said. “He’s the one who set up the red line and didn’t enforce it.”
Watch Christie’s remarks in the video above.