Chris Christie, the early front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, is facing a crisis after emails appeared to show that senior aides conspired to inflict an extraordinary act of revenge against the town of a local mayor who was a political foe.
The private messages detailed how advisers to the New Jersey governor brought traffic gridlock to the town of Fort Lee after its mayor had refused to endorse his re-election campaign last year...
Mr Christie, 51, previously denied that his staff were behind the mysterious closure of access roads to the George Washington bridge, which connects New Jersey with New York, last September.
The throttling of traffic to the bridge, which is the busiest in the world, caused four days of gridlock in Fort Lee, whose mayor, Mark Sokolich, had refused to support Mr Christie’s re-election...
Yet the emails, which were subpoenaed by an inquiry, showed the governor’s senior aides directly ordering the lane closures — and even celebrating the resulting jams that caused misery for thousands of drivers.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Bridget Anne Kelly, Mr Christie’s deputy chief of staff, wrote to David Wildstein, a senior Christie appointee at the port authority. “Got it,” he said.
So far as I've seen, these e-mails to not indicate that Christie himself ordered the lane closures. However I have to ask, did he make some sort of off-hand Henry II type "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" comment?
UPDATE: You can stick a fork in him. He's done.
So, at a minimum, he’s admitted that he’s a shitty manager. It wasn’t some random clerk, it was his deputy chief of staff and his appointee to the Port Authority (and high school classmate, and lifelong friend) who conspired to do this bad, bad thing. Christie knew someone in his administration conspired to do something “unacceptable” for months, and he was only able to find out who from a press report.