A Taxpayer Funded Whitewash for Chris Christie

The news media is awash with denunciations of the $1 million "investigation" done by Chris Christie's attorneys at New Jersey taxpayer expense.  Not surprisingly, Christie's attorneys exonerated Christie from any involvement in or knowledge of Traffic Gate.  Also not surprisingly, the "investigation" and subsequent report failed to involve interviews with critical players and never once contains a direct quote of Christie's statements to his supposed investigators.  In short, the conclusion was known before the attorneys churned out their $1 million report.  The New York Times takes Christie and the investigators to task.  Here are editorial excerpts:

Lawyers hired by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey at public expense issued their findings Thursday on the traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge in September, apparently engineered as a bizarre form of political revenge. To no one’s surprise, Mr. Christie’s lawyers have found his hands to be clean. He was without fault, they declared. This glossy political absolution cost the taxpayers of New Jersey more than $1 million in legal fees. 

We can now add this expensive whitewash to the other evidence of trouble in Mr. Christie’s administration. If Mr. Christie really wants to win back public trust, he and his political allies can start by paying for this internal inquiry out of their own pockets. Then the governor and these lawyers can make all emails and any other crucial information available to federal and state investigators. 

In the report, lawyers from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher said they interviewed 70 people, including Mr. Christie, and studied 250,000 documents, including private phone records for Mr. Christie and his top aides. The lead lawyer, Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor in Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, boasted that his work was “comprehensive and exhaustive.” 

Not exactly.

The report lays the blame for this entire scandal on two of Mr. Christie’s former colleagues, who refused to be interviewed. One was Bridget Anne Kelly, who was Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff until he called her a liar at a news conference and fired her in January. The other was David Wildstein, a former Christie ally and appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who resigned last year. 

Similarly, Mayor Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken, N.J., who is cooperating with federal investigators, declined to talk with the governor’s legal team.  . . . . Without her side of the story, the report nevertheless concludes that her allegations are “demonstrably false” and “do not match objective reality.” 

The Mastro report reveals that Mr. Wildstein told Mr. Christie’s press secretary that he did inform Mr. Christie about the traffic tie-ups as they were happening. The report said Mr. Christie did not remember any such conversation, and simply leaves it at that.  

It makes the absurd assertion that “events in Kelly’s personal life may have had some bearing on her subjective motivations and state of mind,” insinuating that emotional distress might have caused her to orchestrate a traffic jam affecting tens of thousands of commuters. 

Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the co-chairman of the state legislative committee investigating the Christie scandals, said Thursday that the Mastro report reads more like a novel than an investigative report and lacked “objectivity and thoroughness.”  

Mr. Christie has a long way to go to regain public trust and clear his name in this scandal. That will happen only if the real investigators — the state legislative committee and the United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman — can interview all those possibly involved under oath and examine the emails and all documents that can shed more light on the way Mr. Christie operates.

Newark Star-Ledger: Chris Christie Should Resign

As noted in an earlier post yesterday that linked to a New York Times article, David Wildstein seemingly has decided not to fall on his sword to save Chris Christie's more than ample ass and is claiming to have evidence that Christie knew all about the George Washington Bridge government ordered traffic fiasco.  Now, New Jersey's largest newspaper - which had endorsed Christie for re-election - is calling for his resignation or impeachment if Wildstein's allegations prove true.  Here are excerpts from the Star-Ledger's main editorial:

Forget about the White House in 2016. The question now is whether Gov. Chris Christie can survive as governor.

David Wildstein, the man who ordered the George Washington Bridge lane closures, is now pointing the finger directly at Gov. Chris Christie, saying the governor knew about the lane closures in September when they occurred.

That directly contradicts Christie account at his Jan. 13 press conference when he made this statement: "I had no knowledge of this — of the planning, the execution or anything about it... I first found out about it after it was over."

If this charge proves true, then the governor must resign or be impeached. Because
that would leave him so drained of credibility that he could not possibly govern effectively. He would owe it to the people of New Jersey to stop the bleeding and quit. And if he should refuse, then the Legislature should open impeachment hearings.

By the governor's own standard, lying is a firing offense. Here's what he said about his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelley, at the same press conference: "There's no justification for ever lying to a governor or a person in authority in this government. As a result, I've terminated Bridget's employment."

One hopes that he would consider lying to the people of New Jersey as an offense of equal magnitude.

So for now, set aside the other scandals. Forget about the charge of extortion in Hoboken. Forget about the growing evidence showing that Christie used Sandy aid as a political slush fund, leaving the real victims short.

The lane closures in Fort Lee not only caused people to miss meetings, and lose out on business deals. It delayed ambulance responses in Fort Lee, and so put people's lives at risk. It was an abuse of government authority . . . . 

Is Wildstein telling the truth? He faces a criminal investigation himself, so he has a powerful incentive to give prosecutors damning information they can use against a bigger fish. That would give him leverage to negotiate a plea deal. So it is too early to know.

But Wildstein says he has documents that prove the governor was lying at his famous two-hour press conference, when Christie blamed the event on the "stupid" actions of his own staff. And certainly, Wildstein was in a position to know the roots of this conspiracy.

Wildstein's staement means that others who have been implicated in this scandal will probably come forward now as well, hoping to strike deals with prosecutors before their testimony becomes redundant. And all this will happen as the administration answers dozens of subpoenas, and grapples with both criminal and legislative investigations.

When you layer on top of this the criminal investigation in Hoboken, and a separate investigation of Sandy spending by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, it becomes difficult to see how Christie can function. It should be clear even to him now that he should step down as head of the Republican Governors Association.

This is a shocking development. Christie is now damaged goods.

Is Chris Christie's Goose Cooked?

Wildstein with his lawyer

Throughout the New Jersey "Bridgegate" scandal, Governor Chris Christie has claimed that he knew nothing about the contrived plan to cause traffic chaos at the George Washington Bridge.  Now, a former Christie sycophant, David Wildstein who formerly served at the Port Authority is alleging that Christie knew all about it and that the lane closures were the result of a “the Christie administration’s order.”  A copy of the letter from Wildstein's lawyer is here.   If the allegation is true, it proves that ne should never lie about something when others may talk to save their own skin.   Did Christie expect Wildstein to simply quietly fall on his sword?  The New York Times looks at the new information.  Here are excerpts:

The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, central to the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on Friday that “evidence exists” that the governor knew about the closings when they were happening.

A lawyer for the former official, David Wildstein, wrote a letter describing the move to shut the lanes as “the Christie administration’s order” and said “evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference” three weeks ago.

During his news conference, Mr. Christie specifically said he had no knowledge that traffic lanes leading to the bridge had been closed until after they were reopened. “I had no knowledge of this — of the planning, the execution or anything about it — and that I first found out about it after it was over,” he said. “And even then, what I was told was that it was a traffic study.”

The letter, which was sent as part of a dispute over Mr. Wildstein’s legal fees, does not specify what the evidence is. Nonetheless, it marks a striking break with a previous ally. Mr. Wildstein was a high school classmate of Mr. Christie’s who was hired with the governor’s blessing at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the bridge.

Mr. Christie’s office responded late in the day with a statement that backed away somewhat from the governor’s previous assertions that he had not known about the closings in September, which appeared to have been carried out as political retaliation against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, until they were reported in the news media. Instead, it focused on what the letter did not suggest — that Mr. Christie knew of the closings before they occurred.

The letter was sent from Mr. Wildstein’s lawyer, Alan L. Zegas, to the Port Authority’s general counsel. It contested the agency’s decision not to pay Mr. Wildstein’s legal fees related to investigations into the lane closings by the United States attorney’s office and the State Legislature. 

The Legislature has sent subpoenas to Mr. Wildstein and 17 other people as well as the governor’s campaign and administration seeking information about the lane closings. That information is due back on Monday.

But the documents from Mr. Wildstein were heavily redacted, leaving clues but no answers as to who else might have been involved. The documents included, for example, texts between Mr. Wildstein and Ms. Kelly trying to set up a meeting with the governor around the time the plan for the lane closings was hatched. It is unclear, however, what the meeting was about.

Mr. Wildstein’s lawyer has promised to turn over full versions of those emails to the committee investigating the matter, but as of Friday evening, a spokesman for the committee said they had not been received.

His lawyer’s letter suggests that Mr. Wildstein was irritated, if not provoked, by Mr. Christie’s dismissiveness.  “Mr. Wildstein contests the accuracy of various statements that the governor made about him, and he can prove the inaccuracy of some,” the letter added.

Also on Friday, the lawyer for another aide to Mr. Christie sent a 19-page letter to Reid J. Schar, the special counsel leading the legislative committee’s investigation into the lane closures, asking him to withdraw a subpoena seeking a wide range of documents and other materials from the aide, saying it violated his Fifth Amendment rights.

It will be interesting to see how things continue to unfold.  Obviously, if the allegations prove true, Christie's goose may be cooked in terms of any presidential aspirations.

The Media Turns on Chris Christie

Chris Christie hasn't always been kind to the news media although he has often proved adept at manipulating it to his advantage.  Now, things seem to be falling apart as the local news media - which in New Jersey includes the New York Times and principal network affiliates - seems bent on digging out as much dirt on Christie as possible.  Of course, the Democrats are only to happy to help in the effort and are generating plenty of sound bites to spur the media onward.  The irony, of course, is that the entire "Bridgegate" debacle could have been avoided.  The Daily Beast looks at the growing friction between Christie and the media.  Here are excerpts:

For Chris Christie, the national spotlight has always been just across the bridge.
It’s about an hour’s drive from the Trenton statehouse to the studios of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where hosts refer to the New Jersey governor as a “friend” of the show — or to David Letterman’s couch, where he famously ate a doughnut before all of America. The New York Times is considered one of the local papers in the Garden State, and Manhattan’s tabloids have devoted significant attention to Christie’s theatrical politics and outsize personality.

For four years, such proximity was a boon to Christie’s political ambitions, raising his national profile ahead of the 2016 presidential contest and affording him the sort of attention provincial politicians elsewhere in the country could only envy.

Then, it backfired: In the wake of the George Washington Bridge scandal, Christie has felt the wrath that can only come from having the unrelenting mass media universe in your backyard. The anchors, editors and reporters who once marveled at his brash style or gently mocked his girth have now turned to scrutinizing issues of far greater significance — including whether the presumptive presidential front-runner is even fit to govern his own state.

The avalanche of press isn’t due to proximity alone: Christie’s larger-than-life persona has played a significant part in his relationship with the national media as well.

The proximity Christie once enjoyed to the center of the media universe now seems like a cruel joke. To wit, the Bridgegate emails released last week by the New Jersey Legislature show the vice chairman of the Port Authority Board claiming that Wall Street Journal reporter Ted Mann had been “instructed to sniff out this story by his editors who were stuck” in the traffic caused by Christie’s aides. (Mann later said his editors “take the train” and that he did not know where the vice chair’s comment came from.)

“I think there’s some old reporter’s maxim to this effect — or I think I recall hearing it once in some newsroom: ‘Tomorrow’s front page is whatever the managing editor drove past on the way to work,’” said Mark Leibovich, the New York Times Magazine chief national correspondent and author of “This Town.”

For days, Christie has been lampooned on the front pages of the New York City tabloids (the Daily News declared him “pathetic”) and was even featured on the cover of The New Yorker as a little boy playing in traffic. Needless to say, late-night hosts like Letterman, Jimmy Fallon and Jon Stewart — all of whom are based in New York, and all of whom have had Christie on their respective shows — are having a field day.

Whether Christie can weather the Bridgegate storm will depend on several factors, and perhaps most significantly on what revelations come out in the days and weeks ahead. But given his political ambitions, his personality and his proximity to New York — a powerful trifecta — there is no doubt that the story, however it unfolds, will continue to dominate headlines.

“There are going to be tons of stories like this — ‘Christie sharp elbows’ stories, Christie retribution stories,” Heilemann said. “Proximity was Christie’s blessing; now it’s become his curse.”

Will the Feds Investigate Chris Christie?

As the day has gone by the circus surrounding Chris Christie and "bridgegate" as some have coined it  seems to keep growing.  One of Christie's aids has taken the 5th Amendment and now their is talk of a federal investigation.  If Christie is shown to have been involved, along with Virginia's Bob McDonnell's "giftgate" demise, it may become a case study on how to destroy one's political future.  Here are highlights from the New York Times:

In a remarkable day of swirling political drama, Gov. Chris Christie tried on Thursday to control the damage from revelations that his administration ordered the revenge-closings of traffic lanes at the George Washington Bridge by firing a top aide, cutting ties with a longtime political adviser and repeatedly apologizing in a nearly two-hour news conference. 

Sounding somber and appearing contrite, the normally garrulous Mr. Christie said he had had no advance knowledge of the lane closings and had been “humiliated” by the entire episode.

Mr. Christie’s emotional news conference unfolded as the United States attorney began an investigation and as — just down the hall — a former associate who was involved in the lane closings refused to answer questions posed by Democrats investigating the matter, saying that he would tell his story only under immunity from prosecution. 

The Democrats promised to release more documents on Friday morning and issue more subpoenas of Christie aides. And the national news media that has so far bathed Mr. Christie in a distant, generally positive light descended on his doorstep here with a phalanx of television cameras and harsh speculation about whether the scandal would hurt his aspirations to be the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

Mr. Christie fired Bridget Anne Kelly, the deputy chief of staff who sent an email approving the lane closings, whom he called “stupid” and “deceitful.” Her deception, he said, led him to mislead the public, but he did so unwittingly. 

He also asked his two-time campaign manager, Bill Stepien, to step down as a consultant to the Republican Governors Association and to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the state Republican Party.

Democrats argued that the increasing number of resignations and dismissals — two other aides resigned in December — and the names of the governor’s staff members on the emails made it hard to believe that the pettiness was, as the governor argued, “the exception and not the rule” of his administration.

“I find it hard to believe that Bridget Kelly on her own came up with the idea to divert traffic lanes in Fort Lee,” said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat who has been leading the investigation.

“You have an administration that is very hands-on,” he said. “It strains credibility to say that somebody in as high a position as a deputy chief of staff, somebody in as high a position as the governor’s principal spokesperson, somebody in as high a position as his campaign manager, all of whose names are in these emails, didn’t ever communicate this to the governor.”

The United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul J. Fishman, opened an inquiry after the matter was referred to his office by the inspector general for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Some legal experts, however, said it was difficult to imagine how the scandal could yield criminal charges.

The fallout from the release of the emails, which are as brazen as they are blunt, reverberated nationally, threatening to undermine Mr. Christie’s carefully cultivated image.

The controversy is unlikely to abate anytime soon, with New Jersey Democrats vowing to subpoena everyone mentioned in the emails. The State Assembly on Friday will release an additional 900 pages of documents turned over by David Wildstein, a high school friend of Mr. Christie’s who worked at the Port Authority, which could continue to produce more embarrassing revelations.

Chris Christie - Just a Big Fat Bully?

Chris Christie has worked to build an image of being a direct, no excuses politician who speaks his mind.  But now this image is unraveling as it becomes clear that he is also a petty bully willing to screw over constituents when seeking to punish those who do not yield to his demands.  What else explains the now exposed deliberate decision to punish commuters at the George Washington Bridge that connects New Jersey to northern Manhattan.  The paper trail - or should we say e-mail trail - isn't pretty and Christie seemingly is not going to get off easy.  A main editorial in the New York Times takes Christie to task for trying to throw subordinates under the bus to protect his more than ample ass.  Here are excerpts:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has explanations to make, apologies to give and an administrative house to clean now that his top aides and political cronies were shown to have been fully and gleefully aware of the chaos they caused by ordering up lane closings — and a four-day traffic jam — in September at the George Washington Bridge.

New Jersey residents had suspected for months that the sudden, mysterious shutdown of traffic lanes to the bridge in Fort Lee, N.J., may have had something to do with the refusal of the town’s mayor, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, to endorse Mr. Christie for re-election. 

That sounded far-fetched, even for someone known to be as sensitive to slights and as politically belligerent as Mr. Christie. He and his aides said such speculation was crazy talk

Turns out it was his old friend David Wildstein, whom Mr. Christie had appointed as director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority, who ordered the closings. Text messages and emails made public on Wednesday show that Mr. Wildstein and Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, discussed the closings as political payback for Mr. Sokolich, who had no idea the closings were coming. 

The correspondence shows that the lane closings were indeed a stunningly stupid act of petty revenge. They were also an egregious abuse of power. 

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Ms. Kelly said in an email to Mr. Wildstein in August, a few weeks before the closings. 

When the Port Authority’s executive director, Patrick Foye, learned what was happening in Fort Lee, he immediately ordered the lanes reopened, calling the closings dangerous, “abusive,” and probably illegal. 

Mr. Christie, caught out on Wednesday, could no longer scoff at or dismiss the scandal, or blame Democrats for it. There were two possible explanations: either he had been pathetically misled by his scheming staff, and failed for months to get to the bottom of the scandal, or he had spent those months dissembling to any and all. His excuse? He was a dupe. 

Mr. Christie can start by getting rid of every one of his aides and cronies who knew about this scheme and show what actions he will take against the person with ultimate responsibility for his administration: himself. 

 My opinion of Christie certainly has been lowered.  I suspect that I am not alone.