By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
The Bridgegate-obsessed media/Democrat establishment is likely to go nutty over this item, Save Jerseyans, published on Thursday by the NY Daily News:
“Bill Stepien, who lost his job in the scandal, contends he told Christie about the GWB traffic plans on Dec. 12, a day before the governor told reporters his staff didn’t know about them. Christie issued a public apology on Jan. 9, claiming he was lied to by members of his staff on the controversy. Stepien’s lawyer, Kevin Marino, blasted an internal investigation the governor ordered that concluded Stepien had misled Christie about the politically motivated September closures.”
Two thoughts right out of the box…
(1) is there any independent confirmation of the alleged December 12th exchange in existence? An email, text, voicemail, credible 3rd party witness, etc?
And (2) even if there IS, what does it prove?
Remember: David Wildstein’s attorney made a similar claim.
The problem? Absent evidence of complicity in the planning or cover-up of the Fort Lee lane closings, Save Jerseyans, I’m not convinced that nitpicking the Gibson Dunn reports matters for much from a macro-political (or even grand jury) perspective. It’s one guy’s word versus another, and even though anything that undermines his credibility isn’t good, like I’ve been saying since day one, anything short of proving he was involved in the planning/cover-up is unlikely to prove fatal.
Of course, the flip side is that we don’t know enough about the alleged up-the-chain reporting by Stepien at this point to know definitively, and don’t forget that Mr. Stepien successfully invoked his constitutional right not to give testimony before the Wiz’s SCI… BUT we don’t even know if it IS, in fact, a contradiction without knowing more…
Stay tuned…
Are we to conclude from the statements above that personal eye-witness testimony is presumed to be invalid? I suspect that Stepien knows what he did or didn’t say…and, if it wasn’t such an issue, why did CC spend so much time on the phone for weeks afterward with Bush Sr. discussing how to spin it?
He has bigger fish to fry, frankly, as the “LaVergne v Lonegan” docket # 1933-13 L victory last Fall (albeit hollow, as Judge Jacobson grudgingly had to admit we prevailed, but refused to offer remedy, toeing the party line(s), and awarded only costs. ) indicates a culture of disdain for the law from, at least, the Lt. Governor on down – and, with video evidence of at least five specific misrepresentations by the AAG Kelly to the Court that went completely unpunished, (so far), it was obvious that they were willing to do whatever it took to win – and, yet, they failed.
(Lonegan was not an instigator of what happened – merely a beneficiary. This explanation of his name being associated with the case doesn’t exclude him from responsibility, as he was given the opportunity to agree that the laws were violated.)
Say it ain’t so, Chris…