New Jersey lawmaker tried to alert Gov. Chris Christie on the bridge lane closures six days after they reopened. Read the letter.
In case you (wisely) dropped out of BridgGate over the weekend, let me update you on some new developments. The upshot of Friday’s massive document dump was that it didn’t produce any one smoking gun type email like the one that got Bridget Kelly fired. What it did do was paint a pretty clear picture of lots of Christie’s staffers, appointees and associates involved if not in planning the Bridge shutdown then in working to cover it up after the fact. (Here’s our look at the big four unanswered questions as of right now.) But the real change, I think, is a change of what the key question is driving the reporting.
Here are the four big questions hanging above Gov. Chris Christie and the bridge scandal.
Fox’s Brit Hume: Christie Too ‘Tough’ for Today’s ‘Feminized Atmosphere’. Watch.
Demos’ Tova Andrea Wang: New research on Voter ID laws “found in those states where minority turnout rose from the prior presidential election and where there were a larger percentage of minority voters in the years 2006 to 2011, the number of laws restricting voting rights proposed by lawmakers also went up.”
ICYMI yesterday, Brian Murphy’s close look at the billion dollar development project that might be at the heart of the BridgGate scandal.
[THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED.]
We’re looking for a web designer to join our team for a very specific and important job. The job title is Front End Web Designer. And that’s a pretty good description. But I really want to find just the right person for this position because it’s critical to the very ambitious plans we have for this year. If it might be you or if you might know someone who’s a fit, I really hope you’ll get in touch with me.
To date, whether we’ve had one, two or three techs working at TPM we’ve generally taken a “full stack” approach. Each member of the team has a hand in programming and front end design and everything in between. But with our goals this year we’re taking a different approach – two programmers focused on building out our new publishing platform and a third focused on front end design.
This morning I told you about the “follow the money” angle now emerging on Bridgegate. The theory was first floated by Brian Murphy this morning on Steve Kornacki’s show. I asked Brian to expand on his thinking in a piece for TPMCafe and here it is. It’s a must read.
A couple very interesting new threads on the Bridgegate story. As I’ve mentioned, as the scope of the Bridge closure effort and the attempt to cover it up grow, payback for a small town Mayor’s Christie non-endorsement has seemed increasingly implausible as a motive. This morning Brian Murphy went on Steve Kornacki’s show to discuss a major billion dollar development project which would have been gravely impacted (perhaps scuttled altogether) by any permanent move to create a traffic choke point in Fort Lee. (There’s an important disclosure that both men have been very forthcoming about: both worked for Wildstein in former lives when Wildstein ran a NJ politics website called PolitickerNJ.com.) But before getting to that there’s another aspect of this story which I think deserves attention.
There’s been a mystery about just who David Wildstein was texting with in those now infamous texts where he says “I feel badly about the kids … I guess” and the mystery person replies “They are the children of Buono voters.” Well, it was Bridget Kelly.