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David Wildstein Implicates Christie in #Bridgegate
Chris Christie has Tumultuous Super Bowl Weekend
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Well, let me just clear something up, OK, about my childhood friend David Wildstein. It is true that I met David in 1977 in high school. He's a year older than me. David and I were not friends in high school. We were not even acquaintances in high school. I mean, I had a high school in Livingston, a three-year high school that had 1,800 students in a three-year high school in the late '70s, early 1980. I knew who David Wildstein was. I met David on the Tom Kean for governor campaign in 1977. He was a youth volunteer, and so was I. Really, after that time, I completely lost touch with David.
We didn't travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don't know what David was doing during that period of time…We went 23 years without seeing each other. And in the years we did see each other, we passed in the hallways.
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Governer Chris Christie of New Jersey at his Press Conference on January, speaking of David Wildstein, his personal appointee for job at the Port Authority
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From a Memo released by the Christie Administration Saturday evening, Feb 1, to counter an email sent by David Wildstein on Friday, Jan. 31
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As he has said repeatedly, Governor Christie had no involvement, knowledge or understanding of the
real motives behind David Wildstein's scheme to close lanes on the George Washington Bridge
. . . In David Wildstein's past, people and newspaper accounts have described him as "tumultuous" and someone who "made moves that were not productive."
• As a 16-year-old kid he sued over a local school board election.
• He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.
• He had a controversial tenure as Mayor of Livingston
• He was an anonymous blogger known as Wally Edge
• He had a strange habit of registering web addresses for other people's names without telling them
. . . David Wildstein has been publicly asking for immunity since the begin
ning, been held in contempt by the New Jersey legislature for refusing to testify, failed to provide this so-called "evidence" when he was first subpoenaed by the NJ Legislature and is looking for the Port Authority to pay his legal bills.
. . . Bottom line David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein
From Philly.com
Before his Port Authority post, Wildstein was known to many as Wally Edge, a pseudonym nod to former New Jersey Gov. Walter Edge. Wildstein used the name as editor of politickerNJ, an insider website. Wildstein's identity was revealed when he took the helm of the Port Authority in 2010.
Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (R., Morris) described Wildstein - whom he knew only by the pseudonym - as having "just a spectacular grasp of New Jersey political history."
In an interview this week, Carroll, who had himself been accused of being Wally Edge, said the two would correspond via AOL Instant Messenger.
"He would be up at 2 o'clock in the morning asking political trivia questions you couldn't even Google, they were that extreme," Carroll said. "He should have been writing for Boardwalk Empire," the HBO show about Atlantic City crime and politics.
Chris Christie said he barely knew David Wildstein. That was untrue. He said he hadn’t seen Mr. Wildstein in a long time. That was untrue. He’s repeatedly said that he had no knowledge of the lane closures. Today’s revelations raise serious questions about whether that is true.
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Mo Elleithee, Spokesman for the Democratic National Committee
He was like a Christie groupie. He was like a teenager where the sun rises and sets on a rock band or something. He was admiring of the guy. To then be pushed to the side…
I bet every one of those words was a stab directly in the heart
~ Anonymous Port Authority Official, quoted by Daily Beast
What if Wildstein is sitting on some goods? Is he going to be happy being dismissed as too geeky for Christie to waste his time on back in high school?
. . . Depending on what Wildstein has, and on whom, he might set off a domino-effect of people flipping, and then who knows. But so far we don't know what his evidence is.
And even if this goes no further, it still damages Christie, fairly or not. Most people already think he's lying, and this popping up on their cable news channels over the weekend of his state's first Super Bowl is just going to pour salt on that wound. And undoubtedly there's more to come. The nerd is striking back.
Michael Tomasky from "Revenge of the Nerd" on Daily Beast
Kent Dorfmann meets Greg Marmalard, Class President
The relationship with Christie is much more complicated than people understand. The line that Christie had at the presser on the 9th - "I was a scholar-athlete - I didn't mix with David Wildstein" - they weren't buddies, so it's true they weren't best friends. They knew each other, but they're two very different types of personalities.
David Wildstein is a details guy, and doing something that gratuitously insulted him at that press conference was a mistake. A big strategic mistake.
Christie's taking the Greg Marmalard 'scholar-athlete' thing and saying 'I would never hang out with Delta House."
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Brian Murphy on Up with Steve Kornackie, referring to the movie "Animal House"
I worked for Wally Edge.
I discussed it yesterday morning on MSNBC.
I enjoyed working for him. He was a fiercely loyal editor and advocate, and a very skilled observer of all things political. It is true I did not know at the time that Wally Edge was David Wildstein, but I took the job as a professional journalist, with a sense of the ethical obligations I had to sources and readers.
. . . He knew things. He had good sources. He was at least as fair as most other editors I’d worked with. He pushed back against people who gave me a hard time. He put me in a job where I was a daily reporter in one of the most politically cutthroat states in the federal union, and he helped me make it my own while I was there. And he never lied to me. So, yes, I liked Wally Edge. And it’s disappointing to me that we are where we are today.
But you know who else liked Wally Edge back then?
Chris Christie. The same man who earlier today denounced Wildstein for being an “anonymous blogger.”
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Brian Murphy on Talking Points Memo
Of all the arrows fired at Gov. Chris Christie over the years, the one that inflicted the deepest wound came not from a rival, but from an ally.
David Wildstein, by all accounts, was thrilled to be part of the governor’s inner circle. He was known as a loyal member of the palace guard, the governor’s eyes and ears at the Port Authority, a buddy of Christie’s since their high school days.
. . . His reward for that loyal service? He was forced to resign from his job in disgrace.
And then the governor, for no good reasons, belittled Wildstein at a press conference when asked about their friendship in high school.
. . . Wildstein was not seeking money with this letter, and he was not flirting with prosecutors.
He was after Christie. And that explains the timing as well. With the nation’s eyes on New Jersey for the Super Bowl, Christie finds himself running from reporters, and waving away photographers. If you think that’s a coincidence, you haven’t been following Jersey politics for long.
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Tim Moran, New Jersey Star-Ledger
That's right, folks. Christie's office is seeking to discredit Wildstein using evidence ... from high school.
Regardless of whether you think that's below the belt -- and several folks on the Sunday shows seemed to think it was -- it's definitely bare-knuckle politics.
Now, Wildstein was never going to be Christie's ally in this whole matter. Everyone involved is in self-preservation mode, and for Wildstein, providing information about Christie could potentially help him personally -- something Christie's office noted Saturday.
But in these kinds of situations, there's a difference between throwing someone under a bus and running them over with that same bus based on information from high school.
In Wildstein, Christie's take-no-prisoners style has created a bitter enemy who now has an extra incentive to take him down.
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Aaron Blake, Washington Post
