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Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said Gov. Chris Christie took decisive action this week by firing top aides linked to the George Washington Bridge scandal but that "the liberal media elite continues to treat this like the Lincoln assassination."

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TRENTON — Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour defended Gov. Chris Christie in a lengthy interview for "taking the bull by the horns" after a week of explosive revelations that top Christie aides knew about plans to cause a massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge last year.

Barbour also went on the attack, scolding Christie’s Democratic critics and the “liberal media elite” for sensationalizing the traffic jam to imperil the New Jersey governor’s political future.

The Mississippi Republican — one of Christie’s political mentors — said President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten a free pass after their own political scandals in the last five years. Christie, on the other hand, is being walloped in the press unfairly because he is a Republican, he said.

Christie "acquitted himself very well" at a two-hour news conference on Thursday, Barbour said. The governor said he knew nothing of the bridge caper but apologized to New Jersey residents for it and announced he had let go of two top aides involved in the scandal, deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly and his two-time campaign manager Bill Stepien.

“First of all, he stepped up to the plate and took responsibility,” Barbour told The Star-Ledger on Friday night. “The American people are dying for that after five years of President Obama always saying it's someone else's fault.

“He stepped up to the plate and said what a great Democratic president once said: ‘The buck stops here. I take responsibility’ He didn't say, like Secretary Clinton, ‘what difference does it make?’”

At a U.S. Senate hearing last year on the deadly attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, a Republican senator pressed Clinton to say whether a phone call to the survivors would have established that the deaths were the result of a planned attack, not a protest, as the Obama administration first claimed.

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” Clinton said.

The traffic jam ensnared North Jersey commuters for four days in September. David Wildstein, a top official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and a political operative for Christie, shut down two access lanes to the busiest bridge in the world and refused to answer questions this week before an Assembly panel investigating the scandal.

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman’s office is reviewing the lane closures and could launch a criminal investigation.

“The Justice Department, while they don't investigate the IRS for trampling on the rights of conservative groups, is going to be after this like a dog with a bone because it's all about politics,” Barbour said.

“That won't hurt Chris Christie with Republicans if you have the Holder Justice Department chasing him around” — Eric Holder is the U.S. attorney general — “because that's what Republicans have come to expect with this administration. They always say it's somebody else's fault. They never investigate their own, but they always investigate the opposition.”

Barbour said he was baffled that news reports continue to suggest the lane closures were political payback for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, for refusing to endorse Christie’s re-election bid last year. Both Christie and Sokolich have said there was never any discussion about an endorsement, Barbour noted.

“Yet the left continues to talk about this as vengeance and bullying and getting even. Getting even for what?” he said. “The liberal media elite continues to treat this like the Lincoln assassination.”

E-mails and text messages obtained through subpoenas by Assembly Democrats show that Kelly, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, told Wildstein a month before the lane closures that it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” (Christie fired Kelly on Thursday.)

In the documents, Wildstein denigrates Sokolich as a “little Serbian” and dismisses Fort Lee commuters as the “children of Buono voters” — a reference to Christie’s Democratic challenger last year, Barbara Buono. (Wildstein has resigned his post at the Port Authority.)

The documents, 908 pages of which were released Friday by Assembly Democrats, also indicate that Port Authority chairman David Samson, Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak and campaign manager Bill Stepien were in discussions about the lane closures. (Christie ended his association with Stepien on Thursday.)

Ed Rollins, a Republican presidential campaign strategist, said Christie handled his news conference “as well as he could” but that the bridge scandal already has dampened his image as “Mr. Hands-On.” And he noted that several investigations are still underway and could produce further damning revelations.

“As long as all the facts as stated stand up, he might get away with it,” Rollins said of Christie. “If there are others shoes to drop, he will have evaporated the mandate he just won and will have a tough time governing. It's never a good place when you are the butt of late-night comics, which he now is front and center.”

But Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association that Christie now leads, said Christie was smart enough not to lie.

“The guy's a former federal prosecutor,” Barbour said. “He understands that most people in politics who get in trouble don't get in trouble for what they did, they get in trouble for not telling the truth.”

He added that the party’s donors and fundraisers are likely to keep supporting Christie, and that the New Jersey governor still would be a formidable presidential candidate in 2016 if he chose to run.

“To a person, the people who have commented to me on this — and they have been several — have given him high marks for taking the bull by the horns, for taking responsibility,” Barbour said. “He also took action. I think most people look at this and say, if this guy does the kind of job we expect at the RGA, and if after that he decides he might want to run for president, the way he handled this at the outset will end up being a plus to him.”

Democrats, led by Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Middlesex), have been incredulous that Christie didn’t know what Drewniak, Kelly, Stepien, Wildstein and possibly others in his inner orbit were up to.

Months after the investigation began, it remains unknown why Wildstein closed the two lanes and who made the decision to do so.

“It strains credibility to say that somebody in as high a position as a deputy chief of staff, somebody in has high a position as the governor principal press spokesperson, somebody in as high a position as his campaign manager — all those names are in these e-mails — did not ever communicate this to the governor,” Wisniewski said Thursday. “It strains credibility.”

Meanwhile, one of Christie’s potential foes in the 2016 GOP primary, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, when asked about the traffic scandal on CNN on Friday, had this to say: "I don't know who e-mailed whom, who works for whom. I have been in traffic before, and I know how angry I am, and I'm always wondering, who did this?”

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