Chris Christie says it's 'undeniable' Trump gave him COVID, and calls Mark Meadows' decision to withhold positive test results 'inexcusable'

• Chris Christie said it's "undeniable" that Trump infected him with COVID-19 in an interview with PBS.
• Former chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed in his book that Trump tested positive in late September.

Chris Christie said it's "undeniable" that former President Donald Trump infected him with COVID-19 in 2020 and blasted former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for not disclosing that Trump had tested positive on September 26 in an interview with PBS' Margaret Hoover.

"I think what's less obvious is that Mark Meadows saved this for his book," Christie said. "He saved it for a book...I went into the hospital and the intensive care unit and he didn't tell me. And I think it's inexcusable."

After working closely with Trump and his team preparing the former president for his September 29 presidential debate, the former New Jersey governor tested positive for COVID-19 on October 2 and spent a week in the hospital in intensive care as the former president also suffered a bout with the virus.

Meadows revealed for the first time in his memoir "The Chief's Chief" that Trump had tested positive on September 26, earlier than previously known.

"Mark should have said to all of us, 'Hey, the president tested positive for COVID, we're having another test', and the next came back negative, from he reported," Christie told Hoover. "He had an obligation to tell us, to tell us 'hey, he tested positive.' I would have worn a mask if I had known that."

Instead of conducting a new COVID-19 test, officials simply ran the same sample through another testing device — not a proper procedure for COVID-19 testing — and got a negative result, the Washington Post reported.

Christie added that while he had always "suspected" that Trump had given him COVID, the new revelations from Meadows' book made it "undeniable."

"I was playing Joe Biden, I was siting right across from him..we had some very spirited disagreements during the debate prep, so saliva was flying back and forth between us," Christie said of the debate prep sessions, adding that he knows he didn't give the virus to Trump because he was tested every day.

As Christie noted, six of the seven participants in the debate prep sessions, including White House aides Hope Hicks, Bill Stepien, Kellyanne Conway, and Stephen Miller, tested positive for the virus.

In his own recently-published memoir, Christie wrote that Trump called him when they were both in the hospital (Christie in New Jersey and Trump at Walter Reed National Medical Military Center) to make sure Christie wouldn't publicly blame him for his own illness.

"It takes a little while to process this, and I'm not trying to evade it," Christie told Hoover. "Look, he had an obligation to tell me, and so did Mark Meadows."