As the Donnygate saga continues to unfold, Republican lawmakers have continually strained to keep pace with the ever-shifting explanations from the White House regarding precisely why Donald Trump Jr., the president’s 39-year-old son, sought dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian government source during the 2016 campaign. The It was actually about adoption excuse quickly went out the window after Junior himself released the e-mail thread denoting that he was promised “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” (“I love it,” he replied.)

And then there was the whole fuss over The meeting was a Democratic set-up, an excuse that failed to gain traction in mainstream circles, though it appears to have won over much of the far-right. More recently, there was the The Secret Service is to blame argument, floated over the weekend by the president’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, which seemed to have been discarded after critics noted that the explanation also seemed to implicate the president, who was the only person under Secret Service protection at the time. President Donald Trump’s own explanation—“that’s politics!”—has not gained many adherents within the party, either.

On Tuesday afternoon, Chris Christie presented another thesis, which had gone largely unspoken on the media circuit until the New Jersey governor saw fit to enter the argument into the public discourse. In short, Christie surmised that Donald Trump Jr. is simply not clever enough to have knowingly colluded with Russia. “The recipient of the information — Donald Trump Jr., who I know very well — is by no means a sophisticated political actor,” Christie told Nicole Wallace on her daily MSNBC program, Deadline: White House. “This is a guy who loves his father and got involved in politics because his father got involved.”

“You’re basically saying Don Jr is dumb,” Wallace shot back. Christie didn’t quite deny that this was the implication, but rather offered a veteran jurisprudential tactic: slight avoidance. “He is not sophisticated in this stuff,” he reiterated, before subsequently making the same point three additional times throughout the course of the interview.

The governor, who remains an ardent defender of the president despite being cast out of his orbit last year, conceded that Trump Jr. may have committed a crime. “Receiving information from a foreign government that is of value could be a crime,” he said, though he noted that collusion, “in and of itself,” is not. “I don’t know whether they read the whole e-mail or considered everything,” he said at another point in the conversation, defending then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and adviser Jared Kushner, who also attended the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower. “I will say to you, I was around the campaign a lot, and especially at that time. It was extraordinarily hectic.”