(Any underlines are mine.)
"Did Gov. Chris Christie's (R) administration cripple a New Jersey community with a deliberate, brutal traffic jam, purely out of petty and partisan spite? The question is not as outlandish as it may appear...
...Fort Lee, New Jersey, was effectively turned into a giant parking lot on the first day of school in September, after the Port Authority closed two of the three lanes leading from the community to the George Washington Bridge. The Christie administration later defended the move, saying it was part of a 'traffic study,' though we now know there was no study.
So why cause the massive congestion on purpose? New Jersey Democrats allege the Christie administration was punishing Fort Lee's Democratic mayor for refusing to endorse the governor's re-election campaign. And while that seems hard to believe...the burgeoning controversy is increasingly difficult to dismiss...
...Testifying under subpoena in Trenton on Monday, bridge workers described Mr. Christie's associates' ordering the closings, and called the different maneuvers 'unprecedented', 'odd' and 'wrong.' There was, they said, no study.
Mr. Christie's associates at the Port Authority, they said, ordered bridge workers to shut down the lanes with three days' notice despite warnings that it would cause havoc, and that changes of this magnitude typically took years of planning. They were instructed not to tell anyone--not the news media, not Fort Lee, not even the Port Authority's executive director, who is an appointee of Gov. Andrew W. Cuomo (D) of New York, they said. They protested, but went along, they said, because they feared retribution."
The associate who appears to be the primary source for the shutdown order is David Wildstein who was a high school buddy of Governor Christie and who was appointed by the Governor to serve as the director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority."I keep thinking there must be some reasonable explanation for this, but (a) no one can come up with one; and (b) the Christie administration hasn't offered one. Relevant officials keep sticking to the 'traffic study' excuse, but there's literally zero evidence the study ever existed, and the director of the bridge, Robert Durando, testified (on Monday) 'that in 35 years at the Port Authority, he had never heard of lanes being closed down for a traffic study.'"
The whole idea of creating a massive traffic jam out of political spite sounds like some ridiculous conspiracy theory; but Mr. Benen points out that Mr. Christie is known to micro-manage and Mr. Wildstein is known to be extremely loyal to the Governor, making it doubtful he would have acted on his own.
If Monday's testimony is true, is this a man you would want to have access to that metaphorical red phone?
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