NEW YORK: A New Jersey lawmaker yesterday said he intends to formally request Governor Chris Christie and his staff to hand over more correspondence and documents related to the bridge scandal that has engulfed Christie, a rising star in the Republican Party.
Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat who chairs his legislative body’s Transportation Committee, told CNN he would make the request tomorrow because “there’s still a lot of documents we haven’t gotten we’d like to see.”
Wisniewski’s comments came a day after more than 1,000 pages of anxiously-awaited papers, subpoenaed by New Jersey lawmakers, were made public.
They relate to revelations a member of Christie’s staff appeared to have orchestrated massive traffic jams over four days in September on the George Washington bridge that severely affected the town of For Lee, in what may have been political payback because the mayor there did not endorse Christie’s election bid.
Christie, a powerful figure in the Republican Party and a likely contender for the White House in 2016, has adamantly denied any knowledge of an apparent scheme to snarl traffic. On Thursday, he apologised for the fiasco and said he had fired a top aide, Bridget Kelly, and severed political ties with his former campaign manager after emails surfaced that seemed to link them to the scandal. Two of Christie’s appointees at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bi-state agency that oversees transportation facilities in the region, have resigned over controversy linked to the closures.
Wisniewski told CNN yesterday no evidence or documents have surfaced that link Christie to the lane closures, but he said the Transportation Committee was probing whether anyone else in the governor’s office might have been involved.
“Our investigation would be made immeasurably simpler if the governor’s office would say, ‘Please tell us what you’d like, we’ll turn over all of those documents, the governmental emails, the personal emails, the correspondence, so that you can look at them and determine for yourself,’” Wisniewski told CNN. REUTERS
