New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he had no idea his appointees closed access to the George Washington Bridge in an act of political retaliation.
One person not buying Christie's claim is Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and columnist for National Review.
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In a lead editorial this weekend in
National Review online, McCarthy offers a scathing analysis of Christie's protestations.
McCarthy notes that Christie's firing last week of a top aide for lying to him wasn't the first time someone near him took the rap.
In 2010, Christie education chief Bret Schundler was ousted for purportedly lying to him about not supplying data that cost New Jersey $400 million in federal Race to the Top funds.
But Schundler, a respected conservative and former Jersey City mayor, insisted he had told the governor's staff, and Christie himself, about the mistake immediately after the feds denied New Jersey funding.
In fact, Schundler said, Christie promised no one would lose a job over the issue.
McCarthy recounts that Christie, at first, decided not to blame Schundler, but instead held a press conference blaming the missing data on bumbling D.C. bureaucrats. He claimed that New Jersey officials had shared the data with Washington, though Schundler says Christie knew that was not the truth.
When that story was quickly proved untrue with the surfacing of videotape of New Jersey officials making their presentation without the data, Christie suddenly blamed Schundler.
Christie declared that Schundler had lied to him in claiming the data had been supplied to the feds.
Sound familiar?
The story would have been written off as a "he said, she said" controversy, but the fired Schundler released emails proving his side of the story.
Christie called Schundler's version of events "revisionist history," and the story was quickly forgotten outside Trenton, McCarthy writes.
With Christie now talked about as the potential front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, McCarthy predicts bridge-gate won't be so quick to disappear.
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