Furor grows as e-mails tie Chris Christie aide to bridge traffic jams
A political furor surrounding Gov. Chris Christie intensified today with the release of e-mails and text messages that suggest one of his top aides deliberately created traffic jams in a New Jersey town last September to punish its mayor....

The messages were obtained by the Associated Press and other news organizations today amid a statehouse investigation into whether the huge traffic backup was retribution against the mayor of Ft. Lee for not endorsing Christie for re-election last fall.

“Time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee,” Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly wrote in August in a message to David Wildstein, a top Christie appointee on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

“Got it,” Wildstein replied. A few weeks later, Wildstein closed two of three lanes connecting Ft. Lee to the heavily traveled George Washington Bridge, which runs between New Jersey and New York City.

The messages do not directly implicate Christie in the shutdown, but they contradict his assertions that the closings were not punitive and that his staff was not involved....

The messages “indicate what we’ve come to expect from Gov. Christie — when people oppose him, he exacts retribution. When people question him, he belittles and snidely jokes. And when anyone dares to look into his administration, he bullies and attacks,” Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said....

Wasserman-Schultz said the new material proves that “the governor’s office ordered lane closures that were intended to make first responders experience delays, kids sit gridlocked on the first day of school, and commuters hit logjams, to punish the Democratic mayor who didn’t endorse Chris Christie’s re-election bid.”

[Ft. Lee Mayor Mark] Sokolich said that because of the traffic backup, emergency calls that average a two- or four-minute response time took up to 16 minutes.

“To me it’s appalling and I got to tell you, somebody owes a lot of people a lot of apologies,” he said. “Somebody ought to contact families waiting two, three, four times the response times when their loved ones had chest pains. Someone has to apologize to the thousands of families who couldn’t get their kids to the first day of school on time.”...

“I think this is 10 times worse than Watergate. Because this affected so many more lives and their health and safety,” [Ft. Lee Councilwoman Ila Kasofsky] said.
Somehow I think this kind of thing happens far more frequently than we know. We need to extract these anti-civility, anti-democratic, parasitic-saboteurs-in-power before they succeed in their goal of bringing this country to its knees. I find it more and more difficult to believe that voters have truly chosen to be governed by these saboteurs.


Damage control: Chris Christie fires aide, apologizes to New Jersey in bridge scandal
Christie, sounding subdued and chastened at times, answered questions for nearly two hours about the scandal — an issue he had once joked about by saying he himself had placed the traffic cones....

Christie's comments came amid news reports the U.S. attorney will launch an investigation into the matter. A state investigation is already underway....

Before Christie's news conference, state Sen. Ray Lesniak, D-N.J., called for a federal investigation by the U.S. attorney's office. U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., had already asked the federal Transportation Department to look into the matter.

The. U.S. attorney's office has launched an investigation.

"There's certainly reasonable suspicion that criminal acts have been involved here," Lesniak, a Democrat, said on CNN's “New Day.” "Not only abuse of governmental power for political purposes, but we have reckless endangerment of people's lives and possibly criminally negligent homicide."