Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

Chris Christie's press conference claims don't add up

Christie on Thursday fired a top aide at the center of a brewing scandal that public officials orchestrated a massive traffic snarl on the busy George Washington Bridge to settle a political score.

Christie told a news conference he was stunned and heartbroken by revelations that his staff was behind the traffic jam designed to punish a local mayor who declined to endorse Christie's re-election bid.

Didn't know, didn't ask, didn't care?

There are quite a few inconsistencies in what Christie claimed during his marathon press conference. Some of them are more glaring than others:

Christie claims he learned about the emails/texts yesterday along with the rest of us. That would mean that not only did his Deputy Chief of Staff/Port Authority appointees lie to him repeatedly since September, she/they didn't even tell him after the emails/texts were turned over to the legislative committee, which happened a couple of weeks ago. Given what was turned over and the number of people involved, that seems implausible.

Two of his own appointees were forced to resign over this weeks ago. Press reports were already reporting that documents turned over to the investigating committee were incriminating for his administration. But he says he didn't know those documents even existed until yesterday. Did the governor confine himself to a hermetically sealed box for the last few weeks? Was he working on a particularly interesting crossword puzzle?

Two weeks ago, Christie said his staff had given him a "full briefing" on the investigation. That emails were being turned over directly implicating his office didn't come up? His entire office staff figured that if they didn't tell Christie that emails ordering the traffic closure existed, he would never find out about it?

This would all have been cleared up in an instant if Christie had verified just once that there was indeed a "traffic study" whose particulars meshed with the facts in question. He never did, and in fact was dismissive of reporters who asked whether he had done that. As hardball politician (and one who has no been no stranger to scandals) he never once asked for a scant page or two of paperwork that would have made the single biggest scandal of his tenure disappear in an afternoon? And that his staff was apparently unable to locate such paperwork on their own was unconcerning to him—his claim to the reporter asking the question was that if he produced such documents his opponents would just "find something else?"

On a more petty point: how did Christie "not get a lot of sleep" for the past two nights when he claims he only found out about the connection to his office yesterday? That's one night, Mr. Ex-Prosecutor.

That's not even getting into the premise of Christie "investigating" how this happened while simultaneously expressing no interest in talking to the primary, now-fired witness, but we'll chalk that up to Christie's normal predisposition to vengeance over logic, or his new claims that the fellow who had previously been described as one of Christie's school chums is in fact someone Christie barely knows (convenient, given that the non-friend has spent the morning pleading the 5th.)

So far Christie is pleading total managerial incompetence, up to and possibly including sudden onset amnesia. We'll see how that works out for him.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/09/1268412/-Chris-Christie-s-press-conference-claims-don-t-add-up