Sheesh, what will happen if President Christie feels he’s been snubbed by Putin or Cameron or Netanyahu or their successors?
A handful of people have already testified that there was no traffic study, although Christie keeps talking about like it’s something that might’ve happened.
Washington Post’s transcript of Christie’s news conference.
I can’t recall any politician giving this candid an apology. His disappointment in his staff seems very real. He’s going to Fort Lee this afternoon to personally apologize.
Is it enough? Of course there will be a huge investigation. Charges will probably be filed.
If nothing implicates Christie then he may still be ok. A lot depends on how much he cooperates with any outside investigations. Transparency and a willingness to root out the truth will make a difference.
Rambling does not equal candid. I don’t think it’s wise to take all of this at face value, since he’s said at least a couple of things that are unlikely to be true - like the statement that he just learned about this yesterday.
For what it may be worth, they’ve been tweaking the system now and then for years. I agree that with you that “you would never cause this kind of obvious pain to a community to see if the system needs tweaks,” I was just responding to the suggestion that blocking lanes is per se illegitmate.
Isn’t the bridge operated by the Port Authority? What direct control does the Governor of New Jersey have over them? (I don’t think I knew anything about this traffic jam until this morning, so it was, in fact, conducted by Christie’s staff, then just tell me that and I’ll shut up).
Yes I agree. If Christie is telling the truth, the facts do suggest quite a bit of incompetence on his part.
That his staff engineered a traffic jam is no longer under contention (though Christie denied this last month until these emails came out). His deputy chief of staff asked the Port Authority (and personal high school friend of Christie’s) to cause traffic problems in Fort Lee.
The only question is whether his staff kept Christie in the dark about it or not.
The Port Authority is run by appointments made by the governor, and in practice it’s a crony position. More damaging is that David Wildstein, who actually order the lane closures on the PA side, is a Christie appointment and longtime friend, and by the emails released yesterday took an order directly from Christie’s deputy chief of staff to close the lanes.
So, in effect, the NJ guv has very direct control.
Yes, when Wildstein gave the Mayor of Fort Lee the runaround, the logical thing to do would be to call either the governor of New Jersey or to call the senior Port Authority official from New York. In the latter case, I expect the New York official would have said that this was coming out of the New Jersey side; so the next step would have been to call the governor of New Jersey.
That’s what you do in life – when someone in an organization won’t give you satisfaction, you call his boss up. And the Mayor of Fort Lee has enough juice that one would reasonably expect the governor to accept an urgent call from him.
But who knows, maybe the Mayor of Fort Lee just twiddled his thumbs.
Maybe it’s just because we’ve been watching The Sopranos straight through these past few months, but I can’t help but see and hear Tony Soprano when Christie is there.
If he knew, I must say he’s performing as well as anyone could in this press conference. He’s really good at handling the press.
I personally am still not buying it though. It just doesn’t make sense that he found out Kelly lied and betrayed him and he fired her without confronting her just to ask her for a response.
That’s not my question, really. It was suggested (by you) that we should be skeptical of Christie’s claim that he did not know what was going on becuase he would have demanded to know “why his staff was doing this.” “This” presumably being the lane closures and “his staff was doing” presumably implying that he had direct authority over the people who were directly responsible for the closures. So, all I was asking is whether or not that premise was true. If PANYNJ is an independent agency, and not a direct subordinate of Governor’s office, for example, then I would have less of an expectation that he would insert himself into its day-to-day operations, even when they are going badly. If PANYNJ is something like the NJ State Police (directly responsible to him), then I would be more inclined to agree with your analysis.
But, people appointed by both governors right and functions independently? I’m analogizing it, in my head, to Dulles Airport (for example). Sure the directors are cronies appointed by the governors, and there’s no doubt that they might be engaged in political behaviors, but we wouldn’t expect the Governor of Virginia to look at something going on at Dulles and immediately assume that it was his responsibility (or authority) to step in and stop it. As opposed to something being done by, for example, the Virginia State Police.
The released emails spell out that the mayor of Fort Lee was frantically trying to talk to them, but they were only giving him “radio silence” (their words).
That depends on whether or not he’s telling the truth on some basic points. And he’s been talking for almost two hours, which probably wasn’t a good decision.
This, to me, is what makes the retaliation so idiotic; there was so little to gain, and intimidation only works if the intimidator reveals his identity, which in this case would be political suicide.
At the very least, a reckless emotion got the better of Christie’s staff, so for his own sake Christie would be better off without them because that sort of mistake is likely to happen again. But I suspect it is part of a general attitude in his office which comes from the bully in chief.
No one is buying it. The scandal has reached the “you can’t prove that” stage, and that’s where Christie is plainly hoping to hold the line.
Two things: first, Wildstein clearly took an order from Christie’s DCOS to close the lanes (he responded “got it”), so regardless of his supposed independence, Da Guv had a direct line to a PA ready for instructions, at least on the Jersey side; second, if a governor calls up his appointments at a nominally independent body screaming about how something they’re doing is causing a very large, real problem for his constituents, something is going to get done about it, whether or not there’s an official reporting relationship there. And that’s how it should be. Generally, you would want the governor to be able to exercise soft power to get things done, and a lot Christie’s positive reputation just rests on his record of doing that.
Keep the scale in mind, though. I don’t know about how things at Dulles work, but imagine that everything ground to a halt at Dulles for 3-4 days. Don’t you think the Governor would start calling his crony appointments and demand they fix things? It’s not inserting himself into day-to-day operations. Something extraordinary is going on, it would be natural for the Governor to try to resolve it.
Wildstein just took the fifth in front of the NJ Legislature.
I’m not disputing the first part, at all. As to the second part, point well taken. My question is entirely limited to whether or not Christie’s professed ignorance is, in fact, evidence of complicity, because he would demand that “his staff” not close the lanes.
I know nothing about the traffic situtation (if it made the news down here, I missed it). Still, as I’m reading now, it took New York five days to learn about the traffic situation (and order it alleviated) (sure, the closure happen to people in NJ, but the affected people were going to NY, right? So they have some interest in this).
I just, quite honestly, had a question about the control of the bridge.