Fugget about it!Follow

Yet you refuse to stop doing it.

It was in the timeline link I posted a few threads up.



By October, they were holding hearings once it became clear that no one besides Wildstein had actually authorized lane closures. The traffic study he pointed to had no instructions to close lanes.

As for "why does it have to mean it was retaliation?" - They openly discuss the pleasure they're feeling at the pain of the mayor.

Normally don't bump older threads, but I'm not going to allow this to be the "final word" on this topic:



Yup. So Wildstein didn't order the road crew to do it. He "ordered" Durando to do it. What's missing? Three weeks of presumed meetings on the planned closure between Aug 13th and Sep 6th. All the other people involved. All the people between Durando and the road crew who were involved in planning this during the 3 days between the presumed finalization of the decision/approval of the closures and them actually being closed by road crews.

See where that's a massive gaping hole? This does not prove at all that "NO ONE KNEW THE LANE CLOSURES WERE HAPPENING WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO KNOW", which is what you claimed. Unless you're now going to say that Durando personally gathered the road crews and gave them their assignments? How many more layers are involved here that you're conveniently dismissing?

Why are we focusing on Wildstein and not Durando? Seems like he's the guy in charge of the bridge, right? And you're saying that you know for absolute fact that Durando was never in a meeting in the preceding weeks in which this was discussed? Just seems incredibly unlikely that Wildstein would just out of the blue tell Durando "hey. I want you to close down lanes X, Y, and Z on the GW bridge", and Durando didn't question this, but just blindly did it? And none of the people he tasked with getting it done questioned it?

That seems pretty unlikely. I'll ask again: Where's your evidence that none of the people who should have been involved in a closure like this were aware of or involved in the planning or operation of the closures? Cause all I see is a bunch of people pointing to unrelated data and proclaiming that this is true, but no one's actually saying "we spoke to everyone who'd normally be involved in this sort of thing and no one knew about it".



Yup. So we have the Mayor of Fort Lee speculating that he might have been targeted, but that's not proof that he was. I'm still waiting for more than speculation about the motives of the lane closures and some actual proof.



Yeah. The guy from New York was asking why he wasn't told. And while I'm sure in the interest of politeness and whatnot, he presumably should have been, him not being told isn't the same as "no one" being told. The lane closures were in New Jersey. One assumes that the folks involved in the decision and approval process were all in New Jersey. Show me that no one in the NJ org chart who would normally be involved and informed of such a lane closure were and you'll have a point.

This is kinda what I've been talking about all along. The whole thing smacks of half truths and partial bits of information scattered around and then presented in a way that if you don't actually stop and think about what's actually being said will make you come to a given conclusion. But it's all the stuff that's missing that keeps me questioning this. Where's the list of NJ folks who were cut out of the decision and approval process? Assuming that normally a lane closure like this would require many people in many different layers of the organization to be involved that if they weren't, there would be no problem finding a dozen or so people to give your paper a quote about what happened (or didn't happen).

The lack of such information is incredibly suspicious. Don't you agree?




My understanding is that in October, no one thought this was anything other than a politically motivated smear attack on the Christie administration by the media and a few disgruntled political pundits who thought they could make hay out of the lane closures. Again, if there were actual hearings and actual findings of those hearings, where's the information from them? Where's the proof that they bypassed the normal procedures? Because I would think that if they had that, they'd be printing that in the papers instead of what amounts to nothing more than half truths and innuendo.



Which doesn't mean that the decision to close the lanes was punitive at all. All it means is that they viewed him as a political enemy and when he raised a stink about this and went over their heads, they were annoyed by him. Again though, what's lost in all of this is where the decision to close the lanes was actually made. That it was a bad idea in hindsight doesn't prove that they knew it was a bad idea ahead of time, much less that they deliberately intended such harm. They obviously knew that it would cause a traffic jam, but I don't think we can assume they knew how bad it would be. And the retaliation angle doesn't make sense once one steps outside of the selectively quoted emails and text messages since the closures affected a lot more people than just those living in Fort Lee.


The context of what you're quoting is too narrow. Are you suggesting that no one other than the Mayor of Fort Lee asked about and/or complained about the lane closures? That would seem unlikely, right? So we must assume that the reason your timeline doesn't include the dozen or so other officials and politicians who inquired about what the heck was going on is specifically because they weren't political opponents and thus wouldn't fit well into the "this was political payback" theory. But by excluding all the other information, it presents a very skewed view of events. Don't just look at what's there. Look at what's missing.




No. He backpedaled on his claim that no one on his staff knew about the lane closures ahead of time. That's not the same as any admission by anyone that the lane closures were done for punitive or retaliatory reasons.

Also, as I pointed out earlier, Christie didn't fire her because she closed the lanes for punitive reasons, but because when this was a growing news story she lied to him about knowing about it, allowing him to declare that no one on his staff knew about the closures ahead of time, and thus embarrassing him when evidence emerged that this wasn't true. Again though, her knowing about it is not the same as proof that she and Wildstein were involved in a plot to close those lanes to punish anyone.

For all we know this was a legitimate lane closure, for legitimate reasons, and it was discussed and signed off on by all a whole list of people from the NJ Port Authority and the GW bridge management groups, but it's a more spicy story to talk about all the other people who weren't told and allow the public to draw false conclusions from that.

I'll again point to the Plame scandal, which was entirely about media speculation and the reporting of half truths leading to false public perception of what happened, which in turn was used as fuel by political enemies to launch all sorts of investigations. This looks a hell of a lot like the same sort of created scandal to me. As I've said all along though, that doesn't preclude the possibility that someone really did something they shouldn't have done and abused the hell out of their power for stupid and vindictive purposes. And if that is true, they should be held accountable and nailed to the wall. My problem is that it just seems like I've seen too many of these types of things where it turns into "how can we use this to hurt our political enemies" rather than a "let's find out the truth of what actually happened".

And this absolutely looks like it's turned into a "throw dirt on Christie" thing to me. I'm not saying we don't look into this. I'm just saying that we should look into it objectively and at all the facts, not just the ones that might help affect public opinion in a given direction. Cause we have far too much of that sort of thing as it is.

Edited, Feb 13th 2014 6:11pm by gbaji

Yet you keep doing it.

Stones, glass houses, black tea kettles.

I don't really care about that. Even if that's true, it still is not the same as any admission by anyone that the lane closures were done for punitive or retaliatory reasons.



Yeah. And this is just more word manipulation and interpretation. Christie says something like "If someone closed these lanes for punitive reasons, I was not involved in it, and didn't know anything about it". That gets repeated in the media as "Christie claims he didn't know about lane closures". This is then followed by pundits speculating that "If Christie or anyone on his staff knew about the land closures, it's curtains for them!". Of course, the original statement didn't claim he didn't know that the lanes were closed. I mean, that's stupid. We can assume he turned on the news that day and saw the coverage about the traffic jams caused by the lane closures, right?

It's word manipulation designed to create the perception in the public of a scandal. I'd rather not get caught up in that sort of BS, but instead focus on the facts: Why were those lanes closed? Who approved the lane closures? And is there actual evidence that they were closed as some sort of political payback scheme?

I'm still waiting for *anyone* to show me who in the normal New Jersey planning/approval process for a lane closure like this was cut out of this one. Because if you don't have that, then you don't have anything. The entire scandal rests on the assumption that these lane closures could only have happened for the purpose of political payback, and would never have been approved for some other reason. So if the normal approval process was not bypassed then we're stuck with one of two possibilities:

1. They were all in on it. Every single layer of bureaucracy from top to bottom in the Port Authority and the GW bridge approval process was knowingly involved in a plot to close down lanes to punish the Governor's political enemies. So basically, you're making a "911 was planned by the Bush administration" level accusation, with the same absurdity associated with it.

2. The lanes were actually closed for legitimate (if foolish) reasons, and there was no political payback motivation behind them.


Silly me, I'm leaning towards explanation number 2.

Even Christie's camp isn't arguing at that closures were legitimate, hence people in his immediate circle losing their jobs over the released emails and Christie's repeated conferences where he's said how upset he was that people close to him had betrayed his trust like that. Now they are just trying to put distance between him and the chuckleheads from his upper administration who were involved with it. So, frankly, Gbaji's demands that we present him with a Port Authority org chart are ridiculous beyond the obvious fact that he has no qualifications to review it anyway.

But if he wants to pin his hopes on "No one told me the name of the assistant site supervisor!" then that's fine.

The problem is that "three weeks of meetings" for a legitimate lane closure would have left a legitimate paper trail. One does not exist.

I can go onto the company intranet and dig out at least 50 documents related to any project my company has done, past or present (and a few documents for future ones), in which all the Ts are crossed and Is are dotted, print it out, and stick a several hundred page stack of them on someone's desk within a few hours, if they asked for it. The fact that no such documents for the "traffic study" exist that call out the need for lane closures is a huge sign that, during those three weeks, none of the standard project process was followed.

So when Christie breaks down & cries on live TV, admitting he did it, you're still gonna argue that he really didn't do it, right?

Tell you what. Instead of speculating, or blindly trusting in the absence of data. Why not read some documents yourself?

Just browsing through the first bits from Exhibit A, I see email on Aug 28th to a guy named Jose Rivera, identified with the title "Chief Traffic Engineer" asking him to work out the details of the planned closure. Jose, then responds with a series of plans, and includes 4 other people in the email thread. So just in the first few pages of documents, we see that there was a hell of a lot more to this than Wildstein personally ordering some guys with cones to block some lanes.

Can we please maybe acknowledge that there's a massive political reason to make this into a scandal and that maybe, just maybe, the media is focusing on the tiny little bits that look bad after the fact (like a handful of off color comments made in email) while refusing to report on the much bigger story, which it appears is that this maybe was an actual legitimate traffic study. I mean, how many people have to be involved and informed in what was being done before we stop assuming this was all just cover for some unexplained political payback (seriously? How does that benefit them even if it's true?), and maybe consider that it really was a legitimate (if foolish) traffic study?

I visit a friend of mine for our table top game night once a week. On the drive back, there's a street where half of the lanes are coned off. One of the two turn lanes onto that street has cones blocking it, the lane itself has cones all over the place, and the onramp onto the freeway involves having to drive around them This has been in place for easily a year. I've yet to see any indication of any actual street work being done. They've just blocked off a lane. For a year.

This kind of stupid stuff happens. Forgive me if I don't automatically leap to the absolutely bizarre assumption that it must always be about some kind of bond villanesque plot. Usually, it's just incompetence.


Reading a bit further, even this document dump seems selective. There's almost nothing from prior to the event itself. Almost the whole thing focuses on emails and conversations after the closure. That's nice and all, but not one's really doubting the facts that some people were upset about the lane closures and were angry with the folks who did it. But that's not really the question we need answered, and unfortunately there's very little data about what happened prior to Sep 9th. I'll again point out that there had to have been a large number of people informed and involved, even if the folks in NY were upset that they didn't know about it ahead of time (and why would they, it didn't actually affect them directly).

Edited, Feb 19th 2014 6:51pm by gbaji

Reading even more, I'm finding that one Allison DeCerreno was apparently involved in the study as well (Her title is Toll Systems and Revenue Operations Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Tunnels, Bridges, and Terminals) , and it certainly did appear to include the lane closures. She responds to Foye's questions with data from the study, which apparently ran for a month prior to the lane closures, and tracked the percentage of traffic flow from the Fort Lee lanes on the GW bridge as a percentage of the whole (27% as it turns out, which is "more than their quarter share" according to her). With the lanes conned down to 1, the percentage only dropped to 26.8% in the morning rush, and 26.9% during the evening rush.

It looks a lot like Foye was called out on a decision made below his level that he didn't know about, panicked and claimed that no one knew anything about it, and this has been repeated in the media ever since, despite later discovery that in fact, all the people who were supposed to have been informed and involved in the study were. The organization which DeCerreno worked for is one of the very ones that Foye claimed knew nothing about the planned lane closures in his email sent out Sep 13th. So basically, he was wrong. But the media has continued to repeat his incorrect assumptions over and over.

It's actually some interesting reading, once you get over the fact that the same stuff gets repeated like 18 times due to email nesting.

Oh. And somewhere buried in there is a whole back and forth discussion about whether or not to provide the Fort Lee police department with a copy of the video of the study. Which is interesting since it tells us that the Fort Lee police knew about the study ahead of time, knew what it was about, and wanted video of it. It appears as though people sometimes cut the little tubes that count cars, and they wanted video so they could see if that happened here.

Point being that while that discussion didn't explicitly say that the Fort Lee police knew about the lane closures, they knew about the study. And given how openly everyone was discussing the lane closures in the days leading up to them, it seems hard to imagine that an organization which clearly knew that the study was going to happen was never informed in any way at all? I mean, I suppose it's possible that they were told that video cameras would be installed on Sep 9th to record the study in action but not the details about what else would be involved, but if it happened it had to have been because of an oversight, not some nefarious plot. Otherwise, we're back to the whole "way too many people had to be involved" scenario.


It really does look far more like a whole bunch of people underestimated the impact of the lane closures and when people started screaming, it went past them to their boss (Foye) who panicked and wrote a CYA email explaining that this wasn't normal PA procedure and that heads would roll for failing to do things right, and this in turn fed the idea that corners were cut, which in turn fed the idea that this was done for some nefarious reason. The problem is that it looks like what happened *is* the normal procedure. Maybe it shouldn't be, but no one involved seemed surprised at the process, nor the decisions that were made. I didn't see one single email from anyone involved asking "Hey! Shouldn't we be informing/involving <some other group>?". Not one.


And yeah, the fact that the resulting perception can be used to attack a prominent Republican likely adds to the reason why cooler heads haven't prevailed on this. I fully acknowledge that there's a possibility that this really was a plot for political revenge. But everything I've seen so far screams phony scandal.

Edited, Feb 19th 2014 7:59pm by gbaji