Dear Governor Christie,
I write to you today to implore you to step down as governor of the great state of New Jersey.
I am willing to allow for the possibility that you knew nothing of the politically vengeful closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge. Perhaps your fragile screen of plausible deniability, while stretching credulity, does not entirely rise beyond some legal bar of reasonable doubt. Perhaps, as you have claimed, your team really did keep you in the dark as to what they were conspiring to do on your behalf. We do not know because all we have at this point is your unequivocal denial of any knowledge of the conspiracy, which seems like a fallback position coming so fast on the heels of a similarly unequivocal denial of any involvement on the part of your team and the subsequent revelation of that denial's falsity.
I understand that now the news readers who masquerade as journalists will delight in repeating their Nixon-era mantra, "What did he know and when did he know it?" and that your legal advisers will be hoping to keep the focus on exactly those narrow questions. I do not care what you knew. I do not care when you knew it.
Members of your team conspired with one or more of your appointees to create a traffic jam on the world's busiest bridge, apparently as an act of petty retribution on Mark Sokolich the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee. As a personal act of malice toward this single individual, or perhaps as a way of sending a message to others who might refuse to endorse you as you pursue your political ambitions, your offices had a hand in deliberately damaging the economy of Fort Lee, delaying children on their way to their first days of school, inconveniencing and harming countless citizens of New York and New Jersey.
You chose the people who conspired to abuse the power of the governor's office. You set the tone. It does not matter to me whether you knew of this particular plot, so well planned and prepared that it could be set into motion with a casual email saying simply, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."
Those closest to you, those best acquainted with your desires, tactics, operational policies, and your patterns of behavior are so accustomed to the abuse of power, so inured to the stench of corruption that they assume what you would want to is for gubernatorial influence to be used in the execution of a personal vendetta. That this occurred on your watch is an indication that you are unfit to govern.
While apologist pundits may be able to spin this to seem like nothing more than, "rough and tumble politics," I am almost certain that misuse of public resources, fraudulent claims of a traffic study, conspiracy to disrupt commerce and to hinder travel rise to the level of criminal activity. If they do not, this is a statutory omission that should surely be remedied.
At a time when the working citizens of this nation are experiencing desperate economic difficulties, distrust of government grows daily and the disparity of wealth and power becomes ever more apparent, the egregious nature of this transgression, committed if not by you personally then by those who have served at your pleasure, only serves to further erode the public faith in its system of representational democracy.
For the sake of human decency, the stability of the public relationship with its elected officials, and the good of your constituency, I urge you to resign immediately.
Most sincerely,
Dylan Brody
