Christie acknowledged up front that the Fort Lee story is not over. Combative Christie tries to turn page

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has a 300-page report clearing his name. He has recorded two national television interviews to share with America his feelings of frustration and remorse. At an hour-long press conference Friday, the onetime GOP presidential favorite did everything but unfurl a “Case Closed” banner behind him.

Ahead of a trip out West laced with 2016 implications, Christie made a great, heave-ho attempt this week to push past the political nightmare known as “Bridgegate.” He is due to speak at a Republican Jewish Coalition event this weekend in Las Vegas, followed by Republican Governors Association fundraising retreat in Park City, Utah.


Republicans close to Christie and his team say the past week represented their most concerted effort so far to get clear of the Fort Lee traffic scandal. With an internal review prepared by the Christie-hired law firm Gibson Dunn, the governor faced the press to declare he’s ready to move on.

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Christie announced that his longtime political ally, David Samson, had voluntarily resigned as chairman of the Port Authority, the agency most directly implicated in the Bergen County hijinks. He said he is prepared to follow the Gibson Dunn report’s advice when it comes to the management of his administration, and perhaps a suggestion to break up the Port Authority into separate New York and New Jersey entities.

If the page-turning process is far from complete, the immediate goal of Christie’s multi-day media tour was more realistic: to get out of a defensive posture and give the governor something more concrete to say when people ask him about the mess unfolding in his home state.

The move from playing defense to leaning forward was on vivid display in the contrast between a soft-focus Thursday interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer and his combative Friday press conference. In the space of a day, Christie went from sighing about “Bridgegate” as the “toughest time in my professional life” – an episode in which he “fell short” as a leader – to chastising reporter after reporter for, he said, getting their facts wrong.

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The abrupt shift startled even some Christie allies, who expected him to extend his hair-shirt approach into another public appearance.

“Why don’t you just get to the question, cut the commentary a little,” he urged one reporter Friday, only shortly after the start of his press conference. “You have to get the facts right if you’re going to ask me a question,” Christie told another. He described two different questions as “beneath” the reporters who asked them.

The former federal prosecutor even reiterated, at some length, that he will decide whether or not to run for president independently of this whole unpleasant saga. Christie said he didn’t think the George Washington Bridge fiasco would weigh heavily on how voters consider “my candidacy, if there even is one.”

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“The way I’ll make a decision about whether to seek any future office will be: do I think it’s best for me and my family, and I do I have something unique and particular to offer?” he said. “Anybody who tries to game out the politics of this stuff years in advance, the last several weeks have probably shown them that that’s a fool’s errand.”

Christie acknowledged up front that the Fort Lee story is not over. “I think the report will stand the test of time, but it will be tested,” he said.

The idea is not to close the book on “Bridgegate” forever. Christie’s team is well aware that months of legislative and prosecutorial inquiries lie ahead. To the reporters, investigators and 2016 competitors closely tracking the ongoing George Washington Bridge story, the Gibson Dunn report left countless questions unanswered.

Most of the essential individuals tied to the Fort Lee investigation did not participate in the review, while one key figure – former Port Authority official David Wildstein – offered testimony that directly contradicted Christie’s own account of when he learned of the disputed lane closings in northern New Jersey. The report also included the lurid disclosure that two Christie aides dismissed for their link to snarled George Washington Bridge traffic, former deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly and former campaign manager Bill Stepien, had been romantically involved.

And it’s still unclear why Christie’s appointees went out of their way to close down several lanes of traffic in the first place. The governor acknowledged that the original explanation – a “traffic study” – now looks dubious. “It mystifies me on every level why this was done,” he said.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, now an RJC board member, said by phone from Las Vegas that Christie was “wounded” but not irretrievably so – and that for the RJC members at this weekend’s conference, Fort Lee traffic patterns were “the last thing on their minds.”

“Questions to [Christie] are all going to be about Israel and Iran, foreign policy, Ukraine, taxes,” he said. “It’s back to basics and it has been for months, for everyone but the media. That’s why Christie has to blow through it, do interviews and just exhaust the topic.”

In the press conference, Christie also scoffed at the notion that he was attempting to clear the air before an out-of-state trip laden with political significance. He has been on political trips to “seven or eight states” recently, Christie observed.

“There is significantly less interest around the country about this report than there is in this region,” he said.

For the first time since the traffic scandal took over Christie’s political world in early January, he also seriously entertained questions about the presidential race. Rather than chiding Diane Sawyer for asking him about 2016 or maintaining a strictly penitent tone – “You don’t sleep, you don’t eat” – Christie offered a flat “no” when asked whether “Bridgegate” had sabotaged his national ambitions.

“Listen, I haven’t made a decision about 2016. And I don’t intend to make a decision on 2016 till a year from now,” Christie said. “It won’t have anything to do with what’s happened in the past ten weeks.”

That may be Christie’s honest assessment and there is at least a slice of the Republican donor community that continues to hope he is correct. Christie’s intra-party rivals have generally taken a hands-off approach to his political woes, theorizing that if his domestic difficulties disqualify him as a national candidate, they will do so without help from other ambitious Republicans.

To many national Republicans and early-state strategists, musings about 2016 sound increasingly detached from the reality Christie faces in New Jersey: multiple ongoing investigations, conducted in part by his committed political opponents, and very possibly stretching into the start of the presidential cycle next year.

Democrats, meanwhile, continue to take Christie at least seriously enough to trash his performance Friday.

“Now that he’s been self-exonerated, it appears that he’s decided to dispense with his faux humility of the past few months,” Mo Elleithee, the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, said in an email to reporters. “The old Christie’s back – the brash, condescending bully who for years created a culture in his office that led to the Bridgegate scandal.”