I don’t believe him when he says he didn’t know about it.
It wasn’t a bunch of random staff members caught in these emails. It’s his deputy Chief of Staff, a childhood friend he appointed at the Port Authority, and his campaign manager. It’s just not credible that multiple high-ranking staffers with close relationships with Christie would be involved without his knowledge.
Or looking at it another way, Fort Lee officials were running around like madmen after the first day of the lane closures trying to figure out what was going on. Assuming Christie wasn’t involved, wouldn’t he have gotten in touch with the Port Authority to figure out what was going on? The GWB is a vital crossing, this kind of traffic disruption is not small potatoes. I could believe the staffers doing something like this for a single day without his knowledge, but there’s no way this would have continued for multiple days without his approval.
Yeah … except it took him 4 months to “own” what happened. In October/November/December, when he was asked about it, he berated the reporters and acted mystified as to why they were still looking into it.
He’s finally “owning” the scandal now, after proof came out.
The outstanding question through all this is going to be “what did Chris Christie really know? And when did he know it?”
I personally believe that - even if he didn’t order it originally - he had to find out what happened in the intervening few months and had plenty of opportunity to “own” the scandal earlier.
When this story first started getting media attention, I thought, “There’s no way that actually happened. It’s just too silly. It was an accident or a miscommunication or something, and the media is just scandalmongering. I don’t like Christie, but he seems way too sane to be involved in something this… Blofeld-esque”.
Guess I gave him too much credit. Oh, it’s possible that he wasn’t directly involved, but that would still leave him responsible for fostering the sort of environment where senior staffers thought this was a good idea, and for being sufficiently oblivious not to notice.
And failing to ask any questions about it until yesterday or the day before. In the press conference he said he didn’t know anything until yesterday, but said he’s had two sleepless nights over this.
But not at the time, somehow. There’s a lot we’re not going to know until the investigation is over, and even then we don’t know who’s going to tell the whole truth.
Put a bit differently, the only way to plausibly see that Christie didn’t know is one of two scenarios:
[ul]
[li]His office is staffed by people so virtuous and ethical that such behaviour is incredible on its face. From sources like the NYT’s reporting on Christie and the recent book about the 2012 campaign, we know this to be false.[/li][li]His office is staffed by people who so routinely engage in thuggish, bullying behaviour like this that any one incident is unremarkable, and not usually personally approved by Christie. This is not a palatable alternative explanation for Christie’s lack of knowledge.[/li][/ul]
I am not sure that it’s any better if that’s true. His options seem to be that 1) he is a criminal and everyone was acting on his orders (or acting on his will while giving him plausible deniability) or 2) he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what his most senior staff is doing in his name. Either way, this is going to disqualify him from the presidency.
And the thought that hit me last night. This is just what we know about. This was petty. What don’t we know about that was less petty? Is this really how his office deals with anyone who crosses him in the slightest, because Ft. Lee’s only sin was to not clap hard enough for him. What has his office been doing to their actual political enemies?
Everybody is talking like Chris Christie was going to be the Republican nominee. That isn’t going to happen. There’s no way he can get out of the Republican primaries.
Not if she’s in prison. Both New Jersey and New York Attorneys General are opening investigations, as are federal prosecutors now. Kelly and Wildstein are documented committing crimes; Wildstein just took the fifth under subpoena. At the very least they’re either going to jail or cutting a deal with prosecutors. I don’t know what Christie or his cronies could offer her to make jail worth suffering.
Much of what you wrote here is factually incorrect. For instance, to the best of my knowledge, no one was fired by the administration for their involvement in this so-called scandal.