CUI BONO? Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton 2016! Two bad weeks for the RINO Gov Krispy Kreme – Last week he signed “Dream Act” legislation to give NJ Tax money to Illegal Immigrants for College
TRENTON, N.J. (CBSNewYork/AP) — Gov. Chris Christie apologized for lane closures leading to the George Washington Bridge, apparently ordered by his aides as political retribution, and said he had “no knowledge or involvement” in what happened.
Christie, who had previously assured the public his staff wasn’t involved in the road closings, said Thursday he had fired Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly “because she lied to me.”
He said he was “blindsided” and stunned by the “abject stupidity that was shown.”
“I am embarrassed and humiliated by the conduct of some of the people on my team,” Christie said during a nearly two-hour long news conference. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the conduct that they exhibited is completely unacceptable and showed a lack of respect for their appropriate role of government and for the people that we’re trusted to serve.”
WATCH: ‘I Am Heartbroken’
During a previous news conference, Christie had called a Democratic-led state investigation into the incident politically motivated and joked that he had personally put up traffic cones to close the lanes.
“I would never have come out here four or five weeks ago and made a joke about these lane closures if I had ever had an inkling that anyone on my staff would have been so stupid but to be involved and then so deceitful as to not disclose the information of their involvement to me when directly asked by their superiors,” Christie said.
Emails and text messages released Wednesday suggested Kelly and a top Christie appointee at the Port Authority engineered traffic jams in Fort Lee last September to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie for re-election last fall.
WEB EXTRA: Read The Emails
Two of three lanes connecting Fort Lee to the heavily traveled GWB were closed, causing crippling traffic jams in the town.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Kelly wrote in August in a message to David Wildstein, the top Christie appointee at the Port Authority.
“Got it,” Wildstein replied. A few weeks later, Wildstein closed two of three lanes connecting Fort Lee to the bridge.
Kelly wrote the email on Aug. 13, about a month before the lanes closures which caused hour-long backups in Fort Lee during the first week of school. The lane closures were not announced in advance.
The messages do not directly implicate Christie, but they contradicted his assertions that the closings were not punitive and part of a traffic study and that his staff was not involved.
Christie acknowledged Thursday that was a lie, because his staff didn’t tell him what they had done. The Port Authority’s executive director has also testified there was no traffic study planned for the bridge.
“I was blindsided yesterday morning,” Christie said. “That was the first time I knew about this, it’s the first time I had seen any of the documents that were revealed yesterday.”
One of the released texts came from Sokolich, who pleaded on the morning of Sept. 10: “The bigger problem is getting kids to school. Help please. It’s maddening.”
Within minutes of Sokolich’s plea, an unidentified person commented in a text message: “Is it wrong that I am smiling?”
Someone joked in another text that the youngsters referred to by Sokolich “are the children of Buono voters,” a reference to Christie’s Democratic opponent for governor, state Sen. Barbara Buono.
READ MORE HERE