Chris Christie Created a Massive Traffic Jam on World’s Busiest Bridge to Get Back at a Democrat Who Wouldn’t Endorse Him, Private E-Mails Among Government Officials Suggest

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may be more
ready to be president than advertised. Christie had previously
denied his office had anything to do with a massive traffic jam in
Fort Lee caused by a lane closure on the George Washington Bridge,
the world’s busiest, assigning responsibility to a “traffic study,”
but now emails sent from and to the personal accounts of various
Christie officials in Trenton and the Port Authority
suggest the lane closures were, indeed, retaliation. Fort Lee’s
Democrat mayor had previously declined to endorse Christie’s
re-election bid, unlike the forty-plus other local New Jersey
Democrats
who did. The endorsements helped Christie secure a landslide
victory he will likely try to parlay into political capital for the
2016 presidential election.

The Bergen Record
breaks the story:

The messages [obtained by the Record] are replete with
references and insults to Fort Lee’s mayor, who had failed to
endorse Christie for re-election and they chronicle how local
officials tried to reach the Port Authority in a vain effort to
eliminate the paralyzing gridlock that overwhelmed his town of
35,000, which sits in the shadow of the bridge, the world’s
busiest…
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Bridget Anne
Kelly, one of three deputies on Christie’s senior staff, wrote to
David Wildstein, a top Christie executive at the Port Authority, on
Aug. 13, about three weeks before the closures. Wildstein, the
official who ordered the closures and who resigned last month amid
the escalating scandal, wrote back: “Got it.”

Read the e-mails, via the Record,
here (pdf).

Fort Lee’s mayor, Mark Sokolich, told the Wall Street
Journal he was now convinced he was being retaliated
against: “This is the behavior of a bully in a schoolyard. It
is the greatest example of political payback.” The Journal
also notes Sokolich is of Croatian ancestry even though one
Christie official referred to him as a “little Serbian” in a
message.

Christie is the leader some establishment Republicans,
and at least one Obama campaign official, say their party
needs.

More Reason on Christie here.