I think I'll skip the Apology part of his Reputation-makeover tour right now, and instead take a few moments to imagine Chris Christie with his thumb on the Delete button.
Hey he asked us to ... "imagine what would the reaction have been" ...
Christie says he's owed apology for Bridgegate coverage
by Michael Symons, app.com -- May 21, 2015
[...]
On what he called "completely absurd" media coverage of GWB lane-closure scandal compared with stories on controversies related to Hillary Clinton:
"If I had come out the day after the Bridgegate thing was announced and said, 'By the way, all my emails are on a private server, and I deleted a whole bunch of them, and I destroyed the server, but you need to take my word for it, the emails had nothing to do with the bridge stuff,' can you only imagine what would the reaction have been?"
"You saw the coverage of me 15 months ago. I was guilty, guilty. I had done it. Now we're 15 months later, where are the apologies pouring in, that not one thing I said on the day after the bridge situation has been proven to be wrong? [...]
There's got to be some mythology Greek character, like Icarus or someone, who tempts fate one too many times, and finally got burned -- someone who Christie is taking his 'acting cues' from now. This indignant act is going wear pretty thin, if he keeps claiming "it was all them, not me."
"He knows Nothing!" -- remember, that's his claim that protects his scot-free zone -- of executive cluelessness.
Let me refresh the moth-ridden memory of the presidential wantabee, about this little "Deletion Problem" he has of his own. Someone pressed the Text Delete key twelve times this fateful day, and I sure bet it wasn't the Trenton Janitors ...
Why Did Christie Delete 12 Bridgegate Text Messages?
by Andrea Bernstein, WNYC -- December 05, 2014
Contradicting sworn testimony and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's repeated accounts that he barely paid attention last fall to the burgeoning scandal surrounding politically-motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, a new report shows there were 12 text messages exchanged between the Governor and a top aide during an explosive day of testimony a year ago.
That was the day that top officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began to dismantle key elements of the Christie administration's official explanation of events -- that the lane closures were a traffic study gone awry.
AT&T did not release the content of the texts, and it's not unusual that the Governor and the aide would have been exchanging messages that day with the aide, Regina Egea, his incoming chief of staff and head of his authorities unit, who was monitoring the testimony. But their previous denials raises the question of what other communications were deleted as the scandal unfolded.
[...]
But phone records subpoenaed from AT&T show the governor initiated the exchange, sending a total of three texts to Egea on December 9, 2013. Egea returned the text, and sent nine in total, all during the 6 hours of testimony by Port Authority officials in which they called the actions of Christie appointee at the Port Authority David Wildstein "odd" "abberational" and "illegal," denied the existence of a legitimate traffic study, said commuters had been grossly inconvenienced and public safety compromised, and said they feared for their jobs if they disobeyed Wildstein.
Remember his defense, hinges on being 'totally out of the loop' at this time -- that Bridgegate was a cruel joke foisted on him by his "rogue staffers" -- that he was caught 'totally unawares', by their Cone-Closing games. Once he "found out," he fired the culprits, post-haste.
Christie even ended the Job of Port Authority hatchet-man -- created specifically for "his old friend" -- a Job Position that instilled fear into the lowly Port Authority workers, who feared that Mr Wildstein was acting with the authority of the NJ Governor, as a matter of course.
Christie saw fit to "Delete" this key Authority-liaison job, once all their cover stories unraveled in the harsh light of day -- a Job never to be re-filled again, so ask to not raise anymore of those pesky press questions.
Just imagine it.
January 9, 2014 -- Chris Christie:
[...]
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 just -- just to not disclose the information of their involvement to me when directly asked by their superior. And those questions were not asked, by the way, just once; they were asked repeatedly.
[...]
As I mentioned to you earlier, I spent all day yesterday digging into talking to folks and getting to the bottom of things. I know there was much discussion yesterday about what was I doing.
Well, let me tell you, everybody, I was blindsided yesterday morning. I was done with my workout yesterday morning and got a call from my communications director at about 8:50, 8:55, informing me of this story that had just broken on the Bergen Record website. That was the first time I knew about this. That was the first time I had seen any of the documents that were revealed yesterday. [...]
--
Full transcript:
N.J. Gov. Chris Christie’s Jan. 9 news conference on George Washington Bridge scandal -- washingtonpost.com -- January 9, 2014
Yet just a mere 4 or 5 week prior, Christie was attentively taking "play-by-play" court update Texts, from his executive assistant -- as their "Only a Traffic Study" cover story, was abruptly turning into only so much contemptible confetti.
BREAKING: Christie Aide Deleted Texts To Governor, Lied About It In Testimony
americanbridgepac.org -- December 05, 2014
[...]
Even at the time, Egea’s deleted text message story raised eyebrows and was rebuked by many as a clear attempt to hide something. Here’s how the Star-Ledger editorial board summarized her dubious narrative:
Last November, Egea -- Christie’s top liaison to the Port Authority at the time -- helped polish Bill Baroni’s traffic-study remarks to the Legislature’s Bridgegate committee. Baroni, you’ll remember, was Christie’s top staffer in the agency. Weeks later, testimony from other Port Authority officials discredited that tall tale. That, Egea says, is when she texted her assessment of their testimony (“fair and evenhanded”) to the governor.
Is that all she said? We don’t know, because Egea deleted the message.
Luckily for us (not so lucky for CEO Christie), the intrepid
reporters over at WNYC, broke down the court proceeding of that fateful day (
December 9, 2013) -- into their "play-by-play" court context. They put together this
detailed Timeline, and interspersed it with the
Egea-Christie Texts time-stamps --
that somehow were all conveniently Deleted -- once they knew for certain, that Bill Baroni's fictional-tale of a "
Traffic Study" had been decisively dismantled, by the court testimony ...
Here are a few "key milestones" of that pivotal Bridgegate-Texting day:
As the lane closures snarl traffic, impede policing, and snare school buses during the first week of school, the Port Authority staff warns Wildstein that the "study" should be halted. He refuses to do so.
This was the first of several statements of the day by Port Authority staff that while they thought Wildstein's orders were "odd" and "unprecendented," and that they told him so, they were afraid not to follow his orders.
Inside Port Authority HQ, Wildstein was known for intimidating professional staff, according to current and former employees.
Just two weeks prior to this testimony, Egea had helped craft testimony by another Christie appontee, Port Authority Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni, who argued with great force that the closures were simply a traffic study gone awry. The testimony of Fulton and Durando was the undoing of Baroni's narrative.
Foye, who is under oath, flatly contradicts Baroni's testimony of a week earlier. Egea helped write that testimony. The NJ legislature's report says she'd been asked to do it by David Samson, who had never before made a request that she write testimony for Port Authority staff. Egea refused to allow a draft of the testimony to be emailed, insisting that it be hand-delivered for "document control" purposes.
During the entire month of December, Egea only texted Christie one other time -- on Christmas day. In her own testimony in July as part of the NJ Legislature's Bridgegate investigation, Egea said she had not texted anything about Foye's testimony, had not received a response from the Governor, texted the Governor only rarely, and had deleted the one text she admitted to.
It seems the only thing left to be "Deleted" are the Christie's tall tales of being the unwitting GWB Victim.
Someone owes someone an apology alright -- but I don't expect we'll be hearing it any time soon. Someone's self-righteous ego is too busy spinning the latest of his Know-Nothing tales -- to let a simple thing like flat-out honesty, get in his indignation's way.