Okay, the word’s out. As just revealed in this story in the Toronto Star, the TPM delegation to Toronto arrives tomorrow to bestow the Golden Duke award to Mayor Rob Ford. As you know, Ford won a Golden Duke in an unprecedented 4 categories in the 2013 Golden Dukes Awards. As you probably also know, Mayor Ford smoked crack on video and also bragged about cunnilingus in a mayoral news conference, which probably makes the fact about the awards wins go without saying.
EMS responses in at least four medical emergencies were delayed by the George Washington Bridge closure, including one where a 91-one-year old woman later died.
Chris Christie says he was “misled by a member of my staff” in the bridge scandal.
Need to catch up? Behold, here’s the official, epic, Christie-Bridge-opalooza timeline.
If you haven’t been paying close attention to the Chris Christie bridge scandal that’s been simmering these past few months, we’ve published a really clear, simple timeline to help you catch up in light of today’s revelations.
NJ Senate Majority Leader says criminal charges possible in bridge scandal.
Whenever there’s a scandal, everybody reaches for ‘Nixonian’ and the 20 shelves of psychobabble written on what that term means. It’s almost as hackneyed as attaching a “-gate” to every scandal name. So let me start by saying I’m not saying Christie is “Nixonian” or Nixonian in the big sense. But there is a narrow sense in which this is highly, highly redolent of a big part of the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.
Investigators of every stripe dream about getting smoking gun documents like the ones multiple media outlets, including TPM, obtained today. They not only show aides and appointees of Chris Christie conspiring to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., a Democrat who did not endorse Christie’s reelection bid in 2013, but they capture a tone and mentality that, well, you might find in the works of David Chase or David Simon. Jonathan Chait calls it an “almost comical venality bordering on outright sociopathy.”
As I’ve written several times, this Christie Bridge Scandal is far more potentially damaging for Christie that it might seem on its face because its fits so perfectly with the negative view (as opposed to the positive view) of Chris Christie. That is, that he and his crew are thugs and bullies. We have basically demonstrable evidence that one of Christie’s top aides instructed Christie’s crony at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, to create the series of massive traffic jams in the city whose Mayor wouldn’t endorse the Governor.
Put into a mix that a good part of the country has the Sopranos as their primary prism for viewing New Jersey. (And, hey, I’m a former New Jersey resident!) And these emails sound very Sopranos-esque. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Christie Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly told David Wildstein, according to emails obtained by TPM. “Got it,” Wildstein replied.
Newly obtained documents from New Jersey suggest Chris Christie’s office directly involved in Fort Lee bridge closure scandal.