New Jersey Sunday Star-Ledger...front page: The Crisis Widens [View all]

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http://www.nj.com/starledger/pdf/sunday.pdf

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There are lots of time-honored ways for powerful elected officials to punish other elected officials in New Jersey.

Make sure a pending bill disappears off the board. Erase a line item in the budget. Put a patronage hire out to pasture.

But those actions, as correspondence showed last week, seem to have been far too pedestrian for people close to Gov. Chris Christie.

Based on the release of internal doc- uments, a circle of Christie staff and allies appears to have taken politi- cal retribution to a new level when it conspired to send the borough of Fort

Lee into traffic chaos by closing lanes to the world’s busiest bridge — and then covered it up, say Democrats and political observers.