In what was a refreshing break from the right wing and their incurable case of Obmacare-IRS-Benghazi Tourette syndrome, MSNBC's Steve Kornacki explains how the Chris Christie 'bridgegate" scandal affected a whole lot more than just the traffic to Fort Lee for the better part of a week, and wonders if the fiasco was really an effort to undermine a billion dollar real estate development, Hudson Lights.
KORNACKI: So while we talked a lot this week about how the traffic jams caused by the lane closures caused all sorts of headaches for the mayor, just because of the traffic jams and the delayed emergency responses and the stalled school buses, what we haven't talked about is what he asked Baroni about in that email he sent to him, way back when this started going on.
Query: What do I do when your billion dollar redevelopment is put on the line at the end of next year?
A threat to permanently close or reduce those lanes would have been a threat to unravel what Sokolich's visioned as the crown jewel of his tenure as mayor.
As Kornacki noted, this raises a lot more questions than it answers. Here's more from Salon: Steve Kornacki offers up his own solution to Bridgegate mystery:
Longtime friend of Salon and MSNBC host Steve Kornacki threw his hat in the ring of Bridgegate theorists Sunday, offering up a highly plausible scenario explaining the bridge closure.
Center to the story is, Kornacki believes, Fort Lee’s billion-dollar redevelopment project at the very foot of the George Washington Bridge. Kornacki called Bridgegate a “devious political payback scheme,” offering up evidence that the redevelopment project lies at the heart of the scandal.
The “Up” host noted that the bridge closure took place just before the next phase of financing was secured for the Fort Lee project — financing that didn’t get finalized until after Bridgegate. In his initial press conference (a clip from which Kornacki replayed), Christie said: “I’ve talked to Samson [head of the Port Authority and Christie's appointee] about [the issue of Fort Lee having three lanes]. I think that’s something that should be looked at.” Christie said Fort Lee’s bridge access had got him “sauced.” For Kornacki and others, the dots connect to place Fort Lee’s project at the mercy of Christie’s power-play.
