Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), an outspoken critic of President Trump, said the president benefited from the conspiracy theories surrounding the case of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Christie pushed back on the suggestion that it was mostly the people around Trump fueling the conspiracy theories.

“We cannot let the president off that easily,” Christie said. “He benefited directly from it. He fueled it. He encouraged it. And he certainly didn’t stop it.”

“Part of what bothers me in this context is that Donald Trump gets a pass. ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t him. It was somebody else,’” Christie continued.

“He took these people who were doing exactly what you just said and put them in charge of the people on the front line of protecting the American people from crime and terrorism and counterintelligence operations,” he added, referring to FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “He encouraged this, and by putting them in those positions, he supported the work they were doing.”

Bongino, a former police officer and Secret Service agent, hosted a radio show and podcast before joining the administration. He pushed, among other things, conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the Epstein case.

Christie who advised Trump in 2020 before launching a primary challenge against him in 2024 said the president “started this Epstein fire during the campaign” by suggesting, without evidence, that Democrats were implicated in Epstein’s alleged crimes and that they were behind his death in 2019.

Trump’s Justice Department, however, released a memo concluding there was no evidence suggesting Epstein kept a “client list” to blackmail high-profile individuals. The memo also found there was no evidence to suggest foul play in Epstein’s death, which had previously been ruled a suicide.

The memo spurred fierce backlash from some of Trump’s supporters, who had long been calling for the government to release files on Epstein that they thought would expose wrongdoing at the highest level of elite circles.

“What Donald Trump is learning is, when you start the fire, sometimes you can’t put it out,” Christie said, adding that Trump leaned on the Epstein conspiracy theories “to fire up his own base, that he was going to get to the bottom of it, and he was going to release it because he’s absolutely in favor of transparency.”

“Well, now you get into the job and you realize, you know, maybe I don’t want to do that,” he added.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has been the target of much of the vitriol following the release of the memo, but Trump has continued to defend her. Christie said that’s no coincidence.

“Let’s be clear about this: Pam Bondi, there’s no chance, in my opinion, that Pam Bondi made this decision on her own. No chance. She was instructed by the White House that we’re not releasing this stuff. And that’s why he’s defending her,” Christie said.