Bridget Anne Kelly Did Everything Right To Be Scapegoated For Bridgegate

Chris Christie is not on trial, Bridget Kelly is.

Time for some cross-examination problems. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

Time for some cross-examination problems. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

The Bridgegate trial is not, technically, about Chris Christie. The New Jersey Governor is not charged. He has, as of yet, not been subpoenaed to testify. Chris Christie might be the elephant in the courtroom, but he is not on trial (
for reasons passing understanding).

The people who are on trial for retributive lane closures on the George Washington Bridge are Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority, and Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff. David Wildstein, who was basically Christie’s Michael Clayton, has already pleaded guilty, claims to be the mastermind of this whole thing, and is helping the prosecution.

The defendants claim that they thought the lane closures were part of a “traffic study.” They claim that they weren’t trying to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to support Christie’s reelection campaign. Wildstein and Baroni have already testified, with Baroni doing everything in his power to make himself sound like a useless idiot.

But Bridget Anne Kelley has been testifying the past three days, and she is spitting hot fire. Her testimony is television courtroom drama level stuff. Kelly has the misfortune of authoring the famed “time for some traffic problems” email, and boy she does not intend to go down alone.

She’s cried. She’s thrown Christie directly under the bus (or “bridge,” as it were), saying that she spoke to Christie three times about the lane closures, something Christie has repeatedly denied. Kelly says he’s having a “memory issue.” Shade thrown!

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She also says that Chris Christie once threw a water bottle at her, which has nothing to do with the case but will be a fantastic scene when John Goodman plays him in the movie.

On direct examination, Kelly said that she was being scapegoated for Bridgegate. Her problem is that on cross-examination… she kind of makes the perfect scapegoat for this mess.

Not only does Kelly have the damaging “time for some traffic problems” email, she also responded to an email question about kids unable to get to school with “is it wrong that I’m smiling.” And she responded to a text contemplating retribution against some other guy with “We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?”

Furthermore, Kelly admits to deleting emails about her knowledge of the traffic issue. So she got caught deleting documents showing that she knew, but has zero documents showing that Christie knew. She couldn’t be a better scapegoat if you saw her baa-ing in a field asking people to pin things on her ass.

In her testimony, Kelly claims she “panicked” as everybody else suddenly “forgot” about their involvement with the traffic study. Again, her key argument is that she thought she was part of a benign study. She testified: “If I had said ‘time for a traffic study,’ we wouldn’t have all known each other.”

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Let’s consider that. Fort Lee residents have reserved on-ramps to the GW bridge because Fort Lee is a sad little town that lives under a bridge. The “study” was allegedly to see what would happen if the Fort Lee access was shut down and made available to all traffic. According to testimony, Wildstein said he wanted to study it because he believed those ramps were “unfair.”

A 12-year-old playing SimCity could tell you what would happen! From Mother Jones:

Fort Lee traffic resulted in 2,800 vehicle hours of delay. And the analysis noted that even if the traffic queues were half as long, the outcome would still be a net loss. Also, many vehicles sat so long in traffic that they missed peak toll hours, resulting in a revenue loss of $550 a day (or $137,000 over the course of a year).

Duh. Even if the lane closures weren’t revenge for failing to endorse the Governor — even if there had been a legitimate traffic study — the inescapable result of shutting down those lanes, for whatever reason, would be crippling traffic in Fort Lee. There are no other outcomes. Kelly didn’t say “time for some traffic problems,” instead of “time for a traffic study,” because she misspoke. It wasn’t an AUTO-CORRECT error. She said it that way because the two statements mean exactly the same thing. Time for a “traffic study” would have been CODE for “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

She can argue that she didn’t know the traffic study was retaliatory (an argument that strains credulity), but everybody — her, Baroni, Christie, Jon Bon Jovi, Tony Soprano, ANYBODY who has ever crossed the GW — would know that a “traffic study” about closing lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge would cripple Fort Lee.

Which isn’t to say that this is Bridget Kelly’s fault. The alleged “traffic study” would have been so obviously disruptive that you simply cannot convince me that Chris Christie, or ANY Governor of New Jersey, would just not know that a city in his state was not going to function for a week. It’d be like somebody saying “Hey, we’re going to divert the Hudson into the Hackensack this week. Don’t bother to tell Governor Christie, he hates the mayor of Hoboken anyway.” And Bridget Kelly runs around saying, “I thought it was a water study!”

But like I said, Chris Christie is not on trial, Bridget Kelly is. She might have just been following orders, but she damn sure knew what she was doing.

Bridget Kelly said she deleted Bridgegate emails as governor had ‘memory issue’ [NJ.com]


Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. Real talk: A governor ruining a small town whose mayor defied him is kinda how this game has always been played.