NEWARK — Ending a nearly five-month drought on taking questions from New Jersey reporters that began at the start of the Bridgegate trial, Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday said he won’t provide answers for every “loony” thing that was said during the trial.
The governor, speaking at a drug rehabilitation event in Newark, briefly scolded reporters for their coverage of the trial of his former aide and his top appointee to the Port Authority, while simultaneously dismissing initial questions on the subject.
“I’m not going to get into every specific loony thing that was said at that trial that you all breathlessly reported as truth,” Christie said.
“The fact is this, there’s lots of stuff that happened at that trial that turned out, a jury determined, were absolutely baseless lies, and they convicted those liars,” he said.
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Christie also accused the media of having “conveniently misrepresented and intentionally misread” his public comments about the lane closures in the weeks and months after information on the scheme trickled out in public.
He also accused reporters who covered the trial of being “imprecise” and “careless.”
In November, Bridget Anne Kelly, his former aide, and Bill Baroni, a top Port Authority official, were found guilty on nine federal crimes related to their roles in the Bridgegate scandal.
They were convicted of helping orchestrate massive traffic tie-ups at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013. The plot was hatched to send a pointed message to Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, after he stepped back from his earlier public support of Christie, according to government witness David Wildstein, who previously pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in the scheme.
Christie on Tuesday stood by the comments he made in late 2013, when reporters were pressing him on Oslobet details of the lane closures less than a month before the infamous “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email Kelly authored would become public.
At the time, Christie said he had “absolutely no reason to believe that” anybody on his senior staff or his campaign staff closed access lanes to the bridge for political retribution.
“There has been no testimony, except for Mr. Wildstein, that anyone was involved in acts of retaliation, and there was absolutely no testimony that I was ever advised that any of those things were motivated by retaliation,” Christie said.
“What was testified to in the trial, and by the way wasn’t true, but all they said at the trial was that I was told that there was a traffic study. I wasn’t,” he said. “It was a lie.”
Christie added: “I could tell you that much of what Mr. Baroni said on the stand was a lie and that almost all of what Ms. Kelly said on the stand was a lie.”
Christie went on to say that at that at the time of the lane closures, after nearly four years of him being governor, there had been more than 1,100 traffic studies conducted by various state agencies, and that “not one of them had ever been cleared by the governor.”
He concluded in his remarks on Tuesday that the “idea that all of a sudden this one was brought to me is just absolutely ridiculous.”
Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or on Facebook.
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