This article is from the archive of our partner .

New documents released under subpoena by a Chris Christie ally quote an aide close to the New Jersey governor as saying that it was "[t]ime for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" — the town that suffered massive traffic problems in September which, its mayor claims, was retribution for his not endorsing Christie's reelection.

The controversy was been roiling for several months now, with both David Wildstein, that long-time Christie ally and friend, and his boss at the Port Authority, Bill Baroni, resigning from the agency as the New Jersey Assembly investigates the traffic jams. For a week in September, coinciding with the first week of school, several lanes of access to the heavily-trafficked George Washington Bridge were inexplicably closed, taking the town of Fort Lee, at the bridge's western end, completely by surprise. The disruption lasted for four days, eventually ending on Friday of the week after the town's mayor, Mark Sokolich, wrote a letter to the agency. In that letter, he suggested that the closures were "punitive."

The documents, obtained by obtained by The Bergen County Record and shared on Twitter by the Wall Street Journal's Tedd Mann, seem to reinforce Sokolich's concerns. In Mann's formulation, "The email exchange is the clearest sign that a series of lane closures on the bridge in September were carried out at the behest of high-ranking members of Mr. Christie's administration."