So maybe it’s just me. But the thing I found most striking about the Christie news conference yesterday was the question that didn’t get asked. Why did it take this long for him to take a real interest in the story?
The answer seems obvious to me. He took an interest only when the e-mail evidence was revealed. Those e-mails came from the servers of the Port Authority, not his office.
Up until, now the response of the Christie administration was simply deny, deny deny.
They thought they could get away with it because they believed they had deleted the e-mails, no one would ever have proof. So it would always be just “he said - she said,” one person’s word against another’s. They figured they could survive that, or so they thought.
It’s a simple but fundamental mistake. You have to assume there is always a record of e-mails (and texts for that matter) once they’ve been sent.
Yesterday the Christie administration shifted dramatically from joking and denial to full damage control with the obligatory throwing of bodies under the bus; the ceremonial sacrifice. Then of course Christie spent two hours publicly denying he knew anything about it.
My guess is he did know, he’s just counting on the record being scrubbed. My guess though is the record is not scrubbed and the rest of the story is only a matter of time.
The theory of the retribution towards Loreeta Weinberg makes perfect sense to me, a lot more sense than the nonsense about an endorsement from a Democratic Mayor.