In seeking to exonerate Chris Christie of Bridgegate, Randy Mastro of Gibson, Dunn goes back to the playbook used to discredit Anita Hill when she testified against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991. Hill was disparaged and dismissed as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”
In his Bridgegate report, Mastro dismisses Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, who claims she was threatened with denial of Sandy relief funds unless she approved a development project Christie wanted, as nutty. Mastro provides photos of Zimmer yawning and smiling and argues — really — that people who feel threatened don’t yawn or smile.
As for slutty, Mastro offers us Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, who had an affair with Christie’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, that ended just before Kelly ordered the lanes closed on the George Washington Bridge. While Mastro doesn’t establish a motive for closing the lanes, he thinks it has something to do with Bridget getting dumped by Bill:
“Like the others in the lane realignments, events in Kelly’s personal life may have had some bearing on her subjective motivations and state of mind. … Her first known communication to [David] Wildstein about the lane realignment in mid-August 2013, for example, occurred around the time that her personal relationship with Stepien had cooled, apparently at Stepien’s behest and Stepien and Kelly had largely stopped speaking.” So Kelly may not have a face that launched a thousand ships, but she has a temperament that stopped a thousand cars.
Mastro blames the whole thing on Kelly and Wildstein: “Mayor Sokolich also appears to have been targeted for some reason yet to be determined. Whether Kelly had her own ulterior motive for doing so or was simply supporting her friend, Wildstein, is also yet to be determined.”
Fortunately, we have real investigations being conducted by the New Jersey legislature and federal prosecutors to figure out all this “yet to be determined” stuff, which will have a major impact on the “yet to be determined” 2016 GOP presidential nominee, who, I promise you, won’t be Chris Christie.
It’s easy for me, sitting in California, to laugh at this piece-of-crap report because, unlike the poor taxpayers of New Jersey, I didn’t help pay $1 million for it. Although as a federal taxpayer, I did help Christie use Sandy funds to pay for ads he starred in to help his re-election. Christie clearly loves to promote himself using other people’s money.
Christie may have lost 100 pounds since his obesity surgery, but he’s still full of shit. Christie claimed at the outset of the scandal that he didn’t know about the lane closures before or during their occurrence. But Mastro’s report notes that David Wildstein claims he told Christie at a 9/11 event while the lanes were still closed. Mastro swats away this claim as no biggie, saying Christie doesn’t remember such a conversation, and he was very busy with people wanting their pictures taken with him.
I expect as the real investigations proceed, we’ll hear a lot more about Christie’s relationship with Wildstein and a lot less about Kelly’s relationship with Stepien.
Mastro pathetically tries to lift Christie up by kicking Kelly when she’s down. But smearing Bridget Anne Kelly won’t make Bridgegate go away, and it sure as hell won’t make the GOP’s problems with women voters go away.
Embattled Farmers 