Roger Stone: Christiegate Is Another Watergate

 Joe Conason reports for the Santa Barbara Newzhawk:

ery few Republican operatives knew theNixon gang as intimately as Roger Stone, the legendary trickster whose back is adorned with an enormous Tricky Dick tattoo. And very few know New Jersey politics as well as Stone, who toiled among the party faithful in many campaigns since 1980, when he first ran the Garden State for Ronald Reagan.
So when he declares that Bridgegate is Watergate — from the stupidity of the original crime to the peril of the ongoing cover-up — attention must be paid. Especially on the day when the U.S. Attorney's Office investigating the Port Authority's decision to close three lanes of traffic on the world's busiest bridge issues subpoenas to the governor and the New Jersey Republican Party. 

Speaking with The National Memo on Thursday afternoon, Stone said: "This is about hubris, this is about an arrogance and right out of the dark side of Nixon's playbook. It's what ultimately brought Nixon down. There was no reason to break into the Watergate, there was no reason to spy on your enemies. His foreign policy was popular, the economy was good and he was getting re-elected. Just like there was no reason to close these lanes on the George Washington Bridge — although just like with the break-in of Watergate, we still don't really know why they did that."

He doesn't buy the theory that Gov. Chris Christie's aides were punishing the mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse the Republican governor — and thinks it more likely they were trying to harm state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, a determined Christie antagonist whose district includes Fort Lee.

To Stone, the governor's explanations rang false from the beginning — and reminded him of the verbal traps Nixon set for himself. He simply doesn't believe that Bridget Anne Kelly, the deputy chief of staff fired by Christie for "lying" to him, took the initiative to close the bridge lanes.

"The mentality that existed around Nixon — that Teutonic, buttoned-down, we-give-you-orders-you-carry-them-out — that mentality exists inside this administration ... It just doesn't seem plausible to me that this Kelly woman, who seems perfectly pleasant, stepped up to her computer and said, 'Time for traffic problems in Fort Lee.' Someone told her to do that." Stone says the dubious effort to blame her and a few others is the telltale sign of "a cover-up."

Stone doesn't personally know Kelly, but he has known David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who resigned after his role in the bridge closings was revealed, for 35 years. "He's the G. Gordon Liddy of this tale," he said, referring to the maniacal Watergate conspirator who secretly concocted plots to firebomb and even murder Nixon's political adversaries. "He's the 100 percent soldier, the kamikaze. This guy has thrown so many bombs I'm surprised he's got hands left."
When the Wall Street Journal recently published a photo of Christie with Wildstein taken last Sept. 11 — at the height of the lane-closing crisis — Stone was reminded of a classic Watergate question. The photo surfaced after Christie had claimed during his two-hour Bridgegate press conference that he didn't know Wildstein well and hadn't spoken with him for "a long time."

"We're asked to believe that they never discussed it," Stone noted with undisguised sarcasm. "What this becomes is, 'What did the governor know and when did he know it?' That's why I argue that (the scandal is) now a tar baby. First of all, there are now so many people with knowledge of what actually happened; some of them will be facing fines or prison and certainly public humiliation; and how do we know that none of them is going to implicate the governor, either through evidence or testimony? We don't. And because of the governor being very precise about what he knew and when he knew it, anything that proves a contradiction means this guy is history."

More here.