Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Friday that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decisive response to the George Washington Bridge controversy offers a stark contrast to the way the Obama administration has handled scandals.
Mr. Giuliani, a longtime Christie ally, said on “Fox & Friends” that the Republican tackled the issue “exactly the way a leader has to handle a mistake” and “exactly the opposite” of the way that President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reacted following the attacks on a diplomatic post in Benghazi that led to the deaths of four Americans. The former mayor also criticized how Mr. Obama operated after the IRS had been inappropriately targeting conservative and tea party groups.
“They have yet to have a press conference,” Mr. Giuliani said of the Obama administration. “[Mr. Christie] had a press conference, put himself right out on the line, made an unequivocal statement that he knew nothing about it.”
Emails and texts obtained by the Bergen County Record and published on its website this week indicated that the governor’s chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, former campaign manager Bill Stepien and a couple of Christie-backed executives at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey orchestrated the mid-September lane closures on the George Washington Bridge as apparent payback against Democratic city mayor who did not endorse Mr. Christie’s re-election bid.
During a 108-minute press conference in Trenton Wednesday, Mr. Christie said he was wrong to have previously brushed aside the scandal as much ado about nothing.
He announced the firing of Mrs. Kelly and said he withdrew his nomination of Mr. Stepien to be chairman of New Jersey’s Republican Party and also canceled any business Mr. Stepien had with the Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Christie now chairs.
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“Here, he does something that the Obama administration finds impossible to do — he held people accountable for it,” Mr. Giuliani said. “He actually fired him.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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