Folks, I was on the Kelly file hosted by Megyn Kelly on
Friday night to discuss the latest allegations about New Jersey governor Chris
Christie and they do not paint a nice picture of him.
If you haven’t heard, the attorney for David Wildstein,
the erstwhile Port Authority director of interstate capital projects and the
person most responsible for implementation of the closed lanes on the George
Washington Bridge, says that he has evidence that Chris Christie knew about the
scandal during the time the bridge lanes were closed, which is much earlier
than Christie says he did and also that he was aware of the Patrick Foye email
before he said he was.
There is a common character these scandals take when in
the person at the center of them is guilty of doing something wrong and is
desperately trying to hide that fact.
They come out and do a big press conference where they
deny everything, they say they did nothing wrong and had no idea about
wrongdoing, and then drip, drip, drip, the evidence that they did not tell the
truth and that they are guilty of whatever it is they are being accused of
slowly and painfully comes out. Not all at once and sometimes the first
revelations aren’t exactly smoking guns, but it starts with evidence that there
were things said in that big press conference that were just not true.
Something told me when Governor Christie held his January
9th press conference where he denied participating in or in fact all prior
knowledge of any wrongdoing in his administration regarding Bridge-gate, that
this was not going to be the end of his problems with that issue.
For starters, the suggestion that Christie, who claims to
be this extraordinary leader and manager and is in fact a micromanager and
bully and who portrays himself as this guy who is on top of everything but on
this one issue issued a couple of dozen denials that he knew what was going on
until way after it was over, those two versions of Christie that he wanted to
feed us seemed incongruous non credible.
He claimed in his press conference that he didn’t begin
to know something was wrong until press reports began to surface about Patrick
Foye’s email. Patrick Foye is the Executive Director of the Port Authority and
his forceful email on September 13th, the fifth day of the George Washington
bridge lane closures is what ended the lane closures.
The bridge closures occurred from September 9th to
September 13th. Press reports about Patrick Foye’s email didn’t start coming
out until October 1st. That is when Governor Christie says he realized the lane
closures were some kind of issue.
What I want to make sure everyone understands is that the
dual level George Washington Bridge which connects Manhattan and New Jersey and
serves 102 million vehicles per year is the most heavily trafficked bridge in
the world.
This bridge is arguably the most important piece of
infrastructure in a metropolitan area with a lot of important infrastructure. In
order for someone to believe Christie, you would have to believe that the
Governor of a state would ignore a massive ongoing five day crisis with the
most important piece of infrastructure in his state and wouldn’t look into it
at all.
Honestly, who would believe that? Obviously the justice
department doesn’t believe that which is why a Federal investigation complete
with the FBI having agents involved is currently going on with regards to
bridge gate.
I want to talk about some of the important reasons I
think that Governor Christie is guilty of wrongdoing in Bridge gate, but before
I talk about that, I think it’s important to remind you all that there is a
second federal investigation going on regarding the Christie administration
concerning the Christie administration’s use of the Superstorm Sandy funds and
there are several allegations involved.
The first is that Christie improperly
chose between two bids for marketing the relief efforts. There was a bid that
would cost $2.5 million dollars and a bid that would cost $4.7 million dollars
and again this was just for marketing, not actually rebuilding anything. The
costs would come right out of the relief funds. Christie chose the $4.7 million
dollar effort and here is the kicker, the $4.7 million dollar plan involved advertisements
featuring Christie and his family. The lower priced campaign did not.
Also, as reported by NJ.com, Gov. Chris Christie helped
channel $6 million in federal Hurricane Sandy recovery dollars to a project
conceived years before the storm struck, in an Essex County town that was not
particularly hard hit, records show. The funding, pushed for personally by the Republican
governor, was announced less than two weeks before the town’s Democratic mayor
Raymond Kimble formally endorsed him for reelection. The development is an $18 million senior center and
housing complex in Belleville called Franklin Manor. One third of the cost — $6
million — is being paid for by a $1.8 billion pot of federally funded Community
Development Block Grants to help the state recover from Sandy.
There are also the well-known allegations by the mayor of
Hoboken Dawn Zimmer that she was told if she did not endorse Christie’s
re-election, her relief funds for Superstorm Sandy would be affected.
Remember how Republicans and the conservative media
jumped all over her and called her allegations non-credible? Well emails
surfaced on January 28th backing up her story.
The NY Post, again, not a liberal media institution by
any stretch of the imagination reported that newly released e-mails indicate
Gov. Chris Christie’s administration pressured the mayor of Hoboken to approve
a huge development project even during a meeting centered on Hurricane Sandy
relief funds, according to a report.
One e-mail to Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer lists the first
item on the agenda for a meeting about Sandy funds was “review of concepts for
flood control measures at Rockefeller property,” The New York Times reported
Wednesday.
The property refers to a billion-dollar complex that was
being proposed for the city by a Christie-connected developer.
Zimmer requested the meeting after a severe rainstorm
last May flooded Hoboken and raised concerns that the city could be devastated
again.
She said she would not discuss the project at the
meeting, the Times said.
The next day, Zimmer received a call saying Lt. Gov. Kim
Guadagno would be visiting her in Hoboken.
At that infamous meeting, Zimmer claims Guadagno and
another Christie staffer demanded she push forward the redevelopment plan or
risk losing all the Sandy recovery money.
On January 18th, the Washington Post reported that in
September, Adam Schneider, the liberal mayor of the New Jersey shore town of
Long Branch, was having trouble with the state utility board. After repeatedly
getting the run-around, Schneider decided to instead try his luck with the
office of Gov. Chris Christie.
Schneider’s call came four months after he crossed party
lines to endorse the 2013 reelection of Christie (R), whose performance he
admired after Hurricane Sandy. Schneider said that the governor never promised
him anything but that he believes he has received “enhanced” access to state
officials since the endorsement.
The same Washinton Post article says that Jersey City
Mayor Steven Fulop has said the Christie administration suddenly yanked his
access to a contingent of top officials slated to offer guidance on navigating
the state bureaucracy after he declined to back the governor.
So we start to see a pattern here with how the Christie
administration did business. The word pattern may not even do justice to what
this suggests.
Since I promised to do so, let’s talk about some of the lies
or suspicious behavior by Chris Christie regarding Bridge gate:
1. Christie
claims not to have known about the Bridge lane closures until after it was over.
But he met with the person who was one of the prime people responsible for it,
Mr. Wildstein, on September 11th in New York, in the middle of the whole mess
and while the Mayor of Fort Lee was screaming about it to everyone who would
listen. Remember the lanes were closed from September 9th to September 13th.
September 11 was right in the middle.
2. On
December 12th, the Wall Street Journal reports in an article by TED MANN, ERICA ORDEN and HEATHER HADDON that Chris
Christie phoned New York Governor Cuomo about Patrick Foye and the closure
investigation to try to get him to back off of the investigation. A day later,
and ever since, including in his January 9th press conference, Christie has
tried to deny speaking with Cuomo about the investigation. The article
specifically says:
a. New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week to
complain about a Cuomo appointee's handling of a growing controversy over
traffic pattern changes on the George Washington Bridge, a person familiar with
the matter said.
Mr. Christie, a Republican,
complained in a private phone call to Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, that Patrick Foye,
the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was
pressing too hard to get to the bottom of why the number of toll lanes onto the
bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. was cut from three to one in early September,
according to this person. The lane closures occurred without notice to local
authorities, officials have said, and snarled traffic for a week in the small borough
on the Hudson River bluffs.
This particular issue isn’t so
easy for Christie and his goons to use the typical response which is to pass it
off as an attack by that quote Liberal media. We all know the Wall Street
Journal leans conservative.
3. In
response to Wildstein’s lawyer saying this past week that Christie knew about
the lane closures and why they were occurring during the crisis, not afterwards
as Christie claims, Christie issued a statement saying this corroborates his
previous assertions that Governor Christie did not know about the lane closures
in advance. As Megyn Kelly pointed out when she and I discussed this on her
show last night, those two statements are not mutually exclusive. If you take
them together, there is a simple statement that is true in both assertions and
that is that Christie knew fairly early on in the lane closures what was
happening.
All three of these issues cast extreme doubt on the
assertions made by Christie in his January 9th press conference.
I think we can safely say a couple of things about
bridge-gate at this point. The intersection between the statements of
Wildstein’s attorney and the statement released by Christie’s camp along with
the things I outlined earlier regarding the experience and statements of
Democratic mayors in New Jersey and their experience with the Christie
administration suggests to me that Governor Christie fostered a climate in his
administration where it was routine not only to offer quid pro quos, where
support for the Governor by mayors and other local officials garnered one
favorable funding for projects and similar concessions, on the flip side of
that, the lack of such support of Christie by local officials resulted in
retribution and punishment.
Governor Christie expected his staff to threaten and carry
out such measures. It is demonstrated in repeated instances how this was the
case. I think Governor Christie expected that the mayor of Fort Lee Mark
Sokolich would support his re-election because of the killing of the Hudson
train tunnel which would have diverted traffic and business from Fort Lee.
Christie looked at that as a favor and expected quid pro quo in the form of an
endorsement of his reelection.
When he didn’t get that, he expected his staff to
retaliate. Whether he explicitly said it or not, and whether he explicitly said
to close the lanes on the bridge as part of that retaliation is immaterial.
Christie actively fostered quid pro quo and retaliatory policies as a part of
normal doing business for his administration.
You see this with Bridgegate, you see it with the way
Christie used the money for superstorm sandy when I went over that earlier this
is how the Christie administration did business.
I feel sorry for my friends just over the Hudson river in
New Jersey. People don’t deserve to have elected officials who engage in
corrupt practices. These quid-pro-quo and retaliatory actions take money away
from doing the state’s business, they waste the taxpayers money. The people of
New Jersey did not deserve to have Superstorm sandy relief funds spent
needlessly on a more expensive ad campaign that featured the Governor and his
family. They didn’t deserve to have superstorm sandy relief funds go to a
mega-complex in a city that received little to no damage in the storm. They
didn’t deserve to have EMS responders in Fort Lee require four times the normal
response time to respond during the lane closures and the people of New Jersey
didn’t deserve a situation where parent’s in Fort Lee couldn’t get their kids
to school those days. The estimated money lost to New Jersey commuters alone in
gas and time from bridge-gate is estimated at over $20 million. That’s just the
beginning in terms of estimating money lost from that event.
It is starting to come out, it is all going to come out
folks. It is going to come out that all of the worst allegations
regarding Chris Christie and his administration are true.
It’s obvious now. And
you know what, I think a lot more examples of quid-pro-quo and retaliation
haven’t come out yet. As I said, the sense I get is that this was the way the
Christie administration went about business all the time. There may be dozens,
scores or even hundreds of examples before we are over folks.
It’s really sad, this is going to be the second major
corruption scandal facing New Jersey in the last couple of decades, the other
one being ABSCAM now being featured in the film American Hustle.
I can’t even begin to fathom the number of indictments
and convictions that we are going to see. Like the examples of quid pro quo and
retaliation that will come out the numbers could be pretty high before it is
all over.
Let’s hope that those responsible for all of this,
including the Governor, resign, take responsibility and get this over with so
that the people of New Jersey can begin the process of rebuilding their state
government. Yes, I just said Chris Christie should resign. I laid out the
reasons, I don’t think there should be even a question left about that at this
point. This is one of the most corrupt state administrations in American
history. When it is all said and done I think Chris Christie is going to make
Rob Blagojevich look like a boyscout in comparison.
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