Watch: Chris Christie busts Trump on 'outrageous' docs case in first few minutes of CNN town hall

At his town hall on CNN Monday evening, former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) laid into former President Donald Trump, both accusing him of being incapable of putting the needs of the country before himself, and dismantling at length his conduct in the classified document scandal that led to his federal indictment under the Espionage Act.

"I am convinced, if [Trump] goes back to the White House, that the next four years will be all about him settling scores," said Christie to moderator Anderson Cooper. He added, "The bottom line is that if you're lucky enough to become the President of the United States, every day you should wake up thinking about what you do for the people of this country, not what scores you need to settle for yourself."

Christie, himself a former federal prosecutor, had even harsher words for the "outrageous" way Trump removed and tried to conceal highly classified national defense information at his country club in Palm Beach.

"First, it's the nature of the documents that he kept," said Christie, noting that Trump retained things like "battle plans against Iran, nuclear secrets, the presidential daily brief, which has the most important intelligence information that anyone in the country can get. These are not his personal documents. this isn't, like, his doodle notes on his pad ... it's our property, and the government is supposed to have that stuff, not laying around." Second, Christie said, "to suggest to your lawyers that they should lie in response to a grand jury subpoena — I've had a number of people ask me, why did his lawyer make those voice memos about each meeting? ... because he knew Donald Trump, as he's done before, would throw his lawyer under the bus and say his lawyer was lying."

And the third thing that added insult to injury, Christie continued, is that Trump "is voluntarily putting our country through this. If at any point before the search in August of '22 he had just done what anyone I suspect in this audience would have done, which is said, 'All right, you're serious? You're serving a grand jury subpoena? Let me just give the documents back,' he wouldn't have been charged. Wouldn't have been charged with anything, even though he had kept them for almost a year and a half."

That is really the key point, Christie continued: that "none of this had to happen."

"This is all him saying ... I'm more important than the country, these are my papers," said Christie. "You saw in the indictment that his employees were scared. His boxes. His boxes. He wants his boxes near him. He flew the boxes up to New Jersey for summer vacation. What is this, like, they're a family member? Seriously, I've got to have my boxes with me. Let me ask you a question: what exactly was he doing with them? Did someone remind him he's not the president anymore? You don't need these things anymore. This is vanity run amok, ego run amok. And he is going to put this country through this when we didn't have to go through it. Everyone's blaming the prosecutor. He did it. It's his conduct."

Watch the segment below or at this link.