Sokolich called it “appalling” that the traffic jams appear to have been deliberately created at the George Washington Bridge for three days in September 2013.
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The NY Times reports that the accusation came in the opening statements in the trial of two former Christie administration officials, Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni.
Though Christie is not charged with a crime, prosecutors told jurors on Monday that the associates bragged about the lane closures to the governor shortly after they began.
According to the Newark Star-Ledger and other media, a federal prosecutor told jurors Baroni and former Port Authority official David Wildstein had “bragged” to Christie about the closures while they were underway, as they attended a September 11 memorial service.
Former Port Authority official David Wildstein has pleaded guilty. Christie had said senior staff were not involved in that news event. Even Trump, who now has Christie helping on his campaign, has previously implicated Christie in the scandal, telling crowds in December that “he knew about it, he totally knew about it”.
The Associated Press reported Monday that an Afghan immigrant wanted for questioning in the bombings Saturday in New York City and Seaside Park, N.J., had been taken into custody after a shootout with police in New Jersey.
“I have known and liked Chris for 15 years”, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, told the newspaper in a statement about Christie, one of his campaign’s top advisers. During a recent interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Christie said that the so-called Bridgegate scandal was likely a “factor” in Trump selecting Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over him.
Both defense attorneys signaled that they are planning to assault the credibility of Wildstein, a former campaign operative-turned anonymous political blogger who ended up – allegedly by his own description-as Christie’s “enforcer” inside the huge and fractious bistate Port Authority bureaucracy.
If a jury finds Baroni and Kelly guilty, they each could face prison time for their involvement in Bridgegate.
Kelly and Baroni were each charged with seven federal charges, including conspiracy to misuse and actually misusing property of an agency receiving federal funds, conspiring to commit and committing wire fraud, conspiring to oppress civil rights, and acting under color of law to deprive certain individuals of their civil rights. He pleaded guilty past year to two federal counts of conspiracy as part of a plea agreement deal in the lane-closure scandal. Critchley said that his client’s famously blunt email – “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” – was the product of workplace “banter”, and her credulous belief that Wildstein had a plan to study Fort Lee’s traffic patterns. The attorneys said that Wildstein had proudly called himself a “bully” and said that Christie had likened him to Winston Wolf, the character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.
CNN has reached out to Christie’s office, as well as the offices of Baroni and Kelly’s attorneys for comment.
Chase Brush is a former PolitickerNJ reporter and NJ Spotlight editorial intern from North Jersey.
The ranking Democrat, who is considering a gubernatorial run to succeed Christie in 2017, suggested the new information about Christie’s knowledge of the scheme might be grounds to reconvene the legislature’s Select Committee on Investigations, which both he and Weinberg chaired.
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But if prosecutors are right, the behavior of Christie’s aides wasn’t a bug but rather a feature – because Christie apparently knew they tried to exert petty revenge on a town, and endangered its residents, simply because the town’s mayor wouldn’t play ball with Christie politically. And it promises to be a main point for the trial going forward, since the prosecution said there is evidence they will introduce to support the allegation.
