New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Thursday morning that the media showed its bias in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by hammering him on the BridgeGate scandal while letting the former secretary of state off easy for conducting official business over private email.
Christie was asked on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” about the media coverage of the 2013 lane closures on the George Washington Bridge compared to Clinton’s private emails. The governor said he believed that BridgeGate was “much more covered” at the height of the scandal in spring 2014.
“Has there been coverage of the e-mail situation with the secretary? Absolutely,” he said. “But the intensity of the coverage and the relentlessness of the coverage is different and that’s where the bias is revealed.”
Christie said that news coverage of the bridge affair 15 months ago painted him as “guilty,” even though he said during a January 2014 news conference that he had “no knowledge or involvement” in the lane closures.
He then criticized Clinton’s handling of the secret email account, arguing that he would have been excoriated in the press had he taken the same tack during the BridgeGate scandal.
“If I had come out the day after the BridgeGate thing was announced and said, ‘By the way, all my emails are on a private server and I deleted a whole bunch of them and I destroyed the server. But you need to take my word for it, the emails had nothing to do with the bridge stuff.’ Can you only imagine what the reaction would’ve been?” Christie said. “Yet today we don’t talk about the email situation with Secretary Clinton anymore. It’s like it went away. So I do believe that there is an absolute bias and a rush to judgment.”
Christie did have a mishap involving deleted communications during the bridge affair, however.
A Christie staffer told state lawmakers in summer 2014 that she sent the governor a text message regarding testimony one of his former allies implicated in the scandal, ex-Port Authority executive Bill Baroni, previously gave before legislators about the lane closures being ordered as part of a traffic study. Baroni was indicted earlier this month for his part in orchestrating the lane closures to punish a Democratic mayor who refused to endorse Christie’s 2013 re-election campaign.
The staffer told lawmakers she’d deleted that message. Christie said he had no recollection of receiving it.
Is this an admission of guilt?
Guv,you “DON"T” use email remember ?
"Everyone Would Freak Out "
“No, John Hoffman, a Christie appointee and the state’s acting attorney general, said in the opinion, private jet flights and luxury box seats paid for by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and luxury hotel stays worth $30,000 paid for by Jordan’s King Abdullah do not have to be disclosed.”
Well, it would have added to the suspense…, everybody like a thriller…
Oh please!
The Clinton’s are under way more scrutiny than anyone. Has been for a long time. If Hillary so much as sneezes, the media is on it like dip on a chip.
Spare me this crazy notion that there is bias in this story. The “liberal” media has been non-stop on this email crap as well as their charity. They are looking to find something - anything - until the Obama’s take their next trip and the right can pour over the expenses with a fine tooth comb to wail about the cost. The reason noone outside the FOXspere and various other places that hate her anyway is BECAUSE WE ARE TIRED. It’s not even full campaign season and people that work aren’t even really thinking about this stuff. It’s noise.
Also I’m getting sick of politicians whining about how “no one is talking about something” yet in the same breath brag about how many viewers FOXNews gets. If FOX is obsessing over it, that means they are talking which means they have a lot of people listening. But I guess that doesn’t fit the “liberal media” and we are victims narrative.