New GWB files, same callous jokes 
 
 STAFF WRITERS 
 
 The Record 
 
 Click here to read the emails (PDF) 
 
 
 
 Christie's former campaign manager Bill Stepien, left, former Port Authority executive David Wildstein, center, and former deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly. 
 
 GOVERNOR'S OFFICE/TIM LARSEN Governor Christie and first lady Mary Pat Christie look on while Rabbi Mendy Carlebach lights the Menorah during the Hanukkah Holiday Reception at Drumthwacket in Princeton, N.J. on Monday, Dec. 10, 2012. 
 
 Echoing a now-familiar refrain in the scandal surrounding the lane closures at the George Washington Bridge, newly released portions of private messages central to an ongoing legislative investigation contain jokes about causing “traffic problems,” this time at the home of a New Jersey rabbi who had allegedly upset a Port Authority official. 
 
 The information is contained in 20 pages of messages that previously had redactions shielding who sent and received texts between former Port Authority executive David Wildstein and others. The documents do not shed any new light on potential further involvement of the governor’s office, but they show a pattern of disrespect for anyone considered an obstacle to the as-yet unexplained agenda of Wildstein. They also prompted a new round of criticism of Governor Christie, who critics said set the tone in the agency with his appointees. 
 
 Full coverage: Chris Christie and the GWB lane closure controversy 
 
 “It makes really clear that there is a culture of arrogance that is pervasive, and the flippancy with which people’s lives were viewed reflects poorly on the Christie administration,” said Brigid Harrison, a Montclair State University political science professor. “There is clearly a conviction that what they are doing is wrong, and they are doing it anyway.” 
 
 Christie spokesman Colin Reed declined to comment on a list of emailed questions, including whether Christie took responsibility for the tone set at the authority or saw any need to reform it. 
 
 There is a legislative probe as well as an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark into the lane closings and allegations that Christie’s administration threatened to withhold Superstorm Sandy aid from Hoboken unless the city’s mayor supported a $1.1 billion development project. On Thursday, Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak met with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, his attorney said, as a “fact witness.” 
 
 The texts — exchanged between Wildstein and Christie’s former Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly — include snarky jokes aimed at Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, who is a Port Authority police chaplain, including the jibes about causing traffic jams on his street and delaying international flights to Israel. 
 
 Christie attempted to distance himself from similar comments at his two-hour press conference in January, when he announced that he had fired Kelly and was disassociating himself from former campaign adviser Bill Stepien. In those remarks, Christie described Kelly’s actions as “stupid” and “deceitful” and decried Stepien’s display of “callous indifference.” 
 
 In the new batch of texts, the most unscrupulous texts were written by Kelly, Stepien and Wildstein. 
 
 The messages also confirm media reports that Port Authority Police Officer Chip Michaels, a friend of Christie’s from their childhood in Livingston — where Wildstein also grew up — helped Wildstein survey and keep track of the backups throughout the closures. 
 
 The texts occurred six days after Kelly sent to Wildstein her now-infamous email, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” setting off more than four days of gridlock in the borough in mid-September. 
 
 In the texts about the chaplain, Wildstein sent Kelly a picture of Carlebach, later writing: “And he has officially pissed me off.” 
 
 “Clearly,” Kelly responded on Aug. 19. 
 
 “We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” Kelly wrote. 
 
 “Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” wrote Wildstein, an executive at the bi-state agency that controls the region’s airports. 
 
 “Perfect,” Kelly wrote. 
 
 It’s not clear why Wildstein was angry with Carlebach. But the messages echoed comments, already made public, about the Fort Lee mayor that led to speculation that the lane closures were retaliation against the Democratic mayor for not endorsing Christie for reelection. 
 
 Other information disclosed on Thursday showed that in November, Christie’s top Port Authority executive, Bill Baroni, worried that he and Wildstein would be fired. They were not; they resigned in December before the controversy escalated and received praise from Christie on the way out. 
 
 Carlebach, a Middlesex County rabbi, said he was surprised and baffled when told about the passages. He said he has never spoken to Wildstein and had only exchanged pleasantries with Kelly at the State House in Trenton. He is a member of the state’s Homeland Security Interfaith Advisory Council and was a chaplain at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and 2008. 
 
 “I have totally no idea,” he said when asked why he might be the subject of the text messages between Wildstein and Kelly. “I don’t understand it. … None of it makes any sense.” 
 
 He knows Kelly “from the State House” but said the extent of their conversations was “hello” and “good morning” greetings as they passed one another in the hallways. He saw Wildstein at Port Authority meetings but “never engaged him,” he said. 
 
 In the photo Wildstein forwarded to Kelly before they exchanged messages about the rabbi, Carle­bach is posing next to U.S. House Speaker John Boehner. It’s not clear when the photo was taken or why Wildstein was sending it. 
 
 Christie and Boehner have had a hot-and-cold relationship, brought to a head when Christie famously heaped insults on Boehner and the Republican Party leadership for holding up federal aid for Superstorm Sandy in a series of media appearances in January 2013. 
 
 “I think this qualifies as some sort of stalking,” Kelly wrote to Wildstein in response to the Boehner photo, adding, “You are too much.” 
 
 Wildstein replied: “He is the Jewish Cid Wilson,” an apparent reference to a Leonia resident and Bergen Community College trustee who is active in politics and community organizations. 
 
 Wilson said he never met Wildstein and was “deeply appalled and offended” that his name came up in the texts. 
 
 But, he said, when Wildstein was an anonymous blogger, he once poked fun at Wilson for having celebrity Facebook friends. 
 
 Wilson was mentioned in a headline for a 2009 story on the PolitickerNJ website run by Wildstein, about Giants players appearing at a Passaic County political fundraiser: “It’s a perfect chance for Cid Wilson to start a new photo album: ‘me with famous football players.’” 
 
 Wilson said that the reference “seemed odd” to him at the time because he wasn’t even planning to attend the event. He said he was “stunned” that Wildstein made another reference to him last year. 
 
 “I didn’t think he knew me that well,” Wilson said. “I didn’t think that he cared … . It’s a testament to his negative character. I think he’s deeply troubled. It goes to show how deranged he is to make comments about people he’s never met.” 
 
 Wilson broadcast his reaction to the reference Thursday morning on Twitter. 
 
 “Appalled that #bridgegate perpetrator #DavidWildstein made reference to me in newly released emails.,” he tweeted. “He is a psychopath. I’ve never met him!” 
 
 Wildstein’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment. 
 
 “It just adds to the atmosphere of pettiness and inappropriate behavior that these people engaged in,” said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck. “These are people who were chosen for their jobs by Chris Christie. I’ve said this for a long time, and from the very beginning: No matter what we find in terms of Chris Christie’s knowledge or lack of knowledge before or after, he set the atmosphere that this kind of behavior is acceptable.” 
 
 Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-Middlesex, a co-chairman of the joint committee investigating the lane closures, said the new messages did not break new ground, but they enhanced a picture that had already emerged of the Port Authority leadership. 
 
 “What it does show is kind of a juvenile, cavalier attitude to their official responsibilities, and joking about the power they had to create traffic or delay flights,” he said. “It’s certainly disturbing, and it speaks to the need to reform this agency because we don’t want to have the ability of people in a similar position in the future to think that this is part of their job.” 
 
 In the months after the lane closures, the documents show, Wildstein and others tried to stem the fallout. On Nov. 12, the day before a Port Authority commissioners’ meeting, Wildstein got a message from Baroni. “Are we being fired?” Baroni asked Wildstein at 7:24 p.m. There was no response that night. 
 
 The 20 documents also identified for the first time those who sent explosive text messages that were released earlier. 
 
 Kelly was identified as the person who wrote “Is it wrong that I’m smiling?” after being told the Fort Lee mayor complained about delayed school buses and traffic congestion. “I feel badly about the kids,” she wrote, “I guess.” 
 
 “They are the children of Buono voters,” Wildstein responded, referring to Barbara Buono, Christie’s Democratic challenger in the gubernatorial election. 
 
 Those passages had already been reported, but the identities of the authors and recipients of the messages were unclear from the documents turned over by Wildstein in response to legislative subpoenas. The legislative committee that issued the subpoenas asked Wildstein’s attorney to remove redactions from the documents and to identify the participants in some of the discussions. Wildstein’s attorney did that. 
 
 Some redactions remain because the information was deemed irrelevant to the committee’s investigation. 
 
 “The committee’s special counsel addressed with Mr. Wildstein’s attorney the redacted documents submitted by Mr. Wildstein in December,” read a joint statement issued by Wisniewski and Weinberg. “Upon review and discussion, it was agreed that many redactions were appropriate because the material was outside of the subject matter or date range requested, but certain redacted information should be made public.” 
 
 The new messages also show that a Port Authority Police officer, Lt. Chip Michaels, was giving reports to Wildstein about the traffic backups in Fort Lee during the lane closures, which ran from Sept. 9 to 13. Michaels, the documents indicate, chauffeured Wildstein to observe the traffic jams on the first morning of the lane closures. 
 
 “Local ft lee traffic disaster,” Michaels wrote to Wildstein at 8:39 p.m. on Sept. 10, the second day of the lane closures. 
 
 Michaels and his brother were childhood friends of Christie, and like Wildstein, they all grew up in Livingston. 
 
 The documents also identified Stepien as the author of a previously released message sent to Wildstein on Oct. 1. That message apparently references Port Authority Executive Director Pat Foye after an internal agency email was leaked to the media. Foye, who was appointed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, reversed the lane closures in the email and called them abusive and potentially illegal. 
 
 “Holy [expletive], who does he think he is, Capt. America?” Stepien wrote to Wildstein on the same day the email surfaced publicly. 
 
 “Bad guy,” Wildstein replied. “Welcome to our world.” 
 
 Christie cut ties with Stepien last month after the first round of emails was released, saying he was “disturbed” by Stepien’s “tone” in emails where he calls the Fort Lee mayor an “idiot.” 
 
 Two days after Stepien’s exchange with Wildstein in October, Kelly sent a text message to Wildstein making an apparent reference to a quote by Mark Sokolich, Fort Lee’s mayor. Sokolich told The Record in a story published that day that perhaps someone at the Port Authority simply made a “dumb mistake” by closing the lanes. He previously told The Record that he wondered whether he was being sent a message because he had done something wrong. He has since said that he had ignored requests to endorse Christie’s reelection bid. 
 
 “Dumb mistake,” Kelly wrote on Oct. 3, the day the story was published. Wildstein, apparently confused by the message, responded with question marks. 
 
 “Today’s article,” she wrote, adding later: “Sokolich said it.” 
 
 Email: boburg@northjersey.com, koloff@northjersey.com and akin@northjersey.com ||||| Weeks before a manufactured traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge overtook Fort Lee, N.J., at the behest of aides to Gov. Chris Christie, two people central to the scheme jokingly discussed engineering traffic problems at a less prominent site: the home of a rabbi. 
 
 “We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” wrote Bridget Anne Kelly, then a deputy chief of staff for Mr. Christie. 
 
 David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, suggested that they should think bigger. 
 
 “Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” Mr. Wildstein wrote. (Again, he appeared to be kidding.) 
 
 The exchange was revealed in documents supplied by Mr. Wildstein as part of an investigation by the New Jersey Legislature. 
 
 The exchange is dated Aug. 19. Six days earlier, Ms. Kelly wrote that it was “time for some traffic problems” in Fort Lee — in an apparent reference to the plan to close some lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge. 
 
 The lanes were initially closed on Sept. 9, setting off wide-scale gridlock over several days and, more recently, threatening the political fortunes of the governor, a Republican, amid allegations that the closings were politically motivated. 
 
 Though it is unclear why Ms. Kelly or Mr. Wildstein might have been upset with the rabbi, and though the jam at the rabbi’s house appears never to have happened, the documents lend new context to the highly charged environment in which Mr. Christie’s aides operated, an atmosphere of political paybacks where the planned lane closings for Fort Lee could be joked about as a weapon to be wielded against people who irked or defied them. 
 
 The exchange began with a picture of the rabbi, who was identified as Mendy Carlebach of South Brunswick Township, posing with a man who appears to be the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio. 
 
 “I think this qualifies as some sort of stalking,” Ms. Kelly wrote. “You are too much.” 
 
 “He is Jewish Cid Wilson,” Mr. Wildstein replied, referring to a past candidate for a State Assembly seat. (Mr. Wilson’s Twitter page features many photographs with prominent officials.) 
 
 Mr. Wildstein added that Rabbi Carlebach “has officially pissed me off.” 
 
 Seven minutes later, Ms. Kelly raised the prospect of creating traffic problems at the rabbi’s home. 
 
 A lawyer for Ms. Kelly declined to comment, and a lawyer for Mr. Wildstein did not respond to messages seeking comment. A spokesman for Mr. Christie also would not comment. 
 
 Photo 
 
 In an interview, Rabbi Carlebach said he was unsure why he might have drawn the officials’ ire. “I am clueless,” he said, adding that he has not had any “bad interactions” with Mr. Christie or any of his aides. 
 
 Indeed, Rabbi Carlebach seems to have been in their good graces, at least initially. Since 2011, he has served as an appointee of Mr. Christie on the New Jersey-Israel Commission, a group established in 1989 to promote trade and cultural exchange. 
 
 He was among Mr. Christie’s guests during ceremonies held at ground zero 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Rabbi Carlebach and three other rabbis watched from the 21st floor at the unfinished 1 World Trade Center, and he told the website New Jersey Jewish News that the governor “spent a couple of hours mingling with us.” 
 
 In 2012, Rabbi Carlebach was part of a group that traveled with the governor to Israel on an “economic mission” to increase trade between New Jersey and Israel. He was also invited to the governor’s official residence, Drumthwacket, to light Hanukkah candles. 
 
 Rabbi Carlebach says he has been a longtime supporter of Mr. Christie, and he was listed as a Middlesex County co-chairman in the Jewish Leaders for Christie coalition, according to an email from the governor’s re-election campaign on Sept. 3. 
 
 But in the interview, Rabbi Carlebach, who has also served as a chaplain of the Port Authority Police Department, made a distinction between supporting and endorsing a candidate. “I never came out publicly and endorsed,” he said. “I am a clergyman. As a policy I don’t endorse, but I support the governor.” 
 
 In a statement on Thursday night, Rabbi Carlebach called his work “apolitical” and said he had worked with “a number of governors and their administrations.” 
 
 Photo 
 
 Rabbi Carlebach said he did not recall whether Mr. Christie or any of his representatives asked him to consider endorsing the governor more explicitly. He recalled meeting Mr. Boehner in 2008, most likely at a Republican convention where he worked as a chaplain. He attended another convention in 2012 but said he did not remember meeting Mr. Boehner then. 
 
 Though Mr. Boehner has expressed support for Mr. Christie in recent weeks, the two have had an at times fractious relationship. Last year, after a bill to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy did not come to a vote in the House, Mr. Christie assailed Mr. Boehner’s leadership. 
 
 “There’s only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims: the House majority and their speaker, John Boehner,” he said then. 
 
 After the documents, which had been subpoenaed, were released Thursday, critics seized on the exchange as evidence of a pattern of vindictive behavior within Mr. Christie’s inner circle. 
 
 Mr. Wilson appeared particularly surprised to find himself mentioned. He wrote on Facebook that he had never met Mr. Wildstein or Ms. Kelly, adding that it was “quite clear that David Wildstein is a psychopath and deeply troubled.” 
 
 In an interview, State Assemblyman John S. Wisniewski, chairman of the committee investigating the lane closings, said that the officials’ exchange demonstrated “a juvenile attitude toward responsibility.” Mr. Wisniewski, a Democrat, added that the documents included an acknowledgment that some officials were “engaged in conduct that could potentially lead to their termination.” 
 
 The committee’s chairwoman, Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat who serves as the State Senate majority leader, suggested that Mr. Christie himself had “set an atmosphere that this kind of banter was perfectly appropriate.” 
 
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 Before the governor’s re-election last November, his campaign aggressively targeted the endorsements of Democratic mayors, religious leaders and other groups in the hopes of running up an impressive margin of victory. A prevailing theory about the lane closings is that they were intended to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, who did not endorse Mr. Christie. The Port Authority controls many of the area’s major airports, bridges and tunnels. 
 
 The documents include no definitive answer as to why the lanes were closed. But they do help to clarify the roles of various Christie aides now entangled in the scandal, and their attempts to cover up the traffic ruse. 
 
 The documents had been released before with heavy redactions. In one exchange, for instance, a previously anonymous participant in a text conversation with Mr. Wildstein is revealed to be Bill Stepien, Mr. Christie’s two-time campaign manager. In an apparent reference to Patrick J. Foye, the New York-appointed executive director of the Port Authority, Mr. Stepien wrote, “Who does he think he is, Capt. America?” 
 
 “Bad guy. Welcome to our world,” Mr. Wildstein replied. 
 
 The messages took place on the night they learned that The Wall Street Journal was going to report that Mr. Foye had ordered the toll lanes to be reopened in a scathing email to Mr. Wildstein; Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director of the Port Authority; and other agency officials, warning that the closings had broken protocol, and possibly state and federal laws. 
 
 Even in the new version, however, the rest of the conversation remains blacked out. Mr. Stepien, through his lawyer, has said he knew nothing of the plot to close the lanes and broke no laws. 
 
 The documents also indicate that Mr. Baroni, at least, sensed that he might be in trouble in mid-November — two weeks before he testified before a New Jersey legislative committee that the lane closings could be traced to a simple traffic study. 
 
 It was Nov. 12, the night before the Port Authority Board of Commissioners was to have its regularly scheduled meeting, in Jersey City. 
 
 “Are we being fired?” he wrote to Mr. Wildstein. ||||| TRENTON — The leader of a New Jersey legislative committee investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closings said newly uncensored emails released today are “disturbing” and that the two officials at the center of the controversy acted like children. 
 
 “There’s no new ground been broken,” state Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Middlesex), the co-chairman of the committee, said today at the Statehouse. “But what it does show is kind of a juvenile, cavalier attitude toward their official responsibilities and joking about the power they had to create traffic or delay flights.” 
 
 The records released this morning show David Wildstein, a top official at the Port Authority, and Bridget Anne Kelly, who at the time was a deputy chief of staff in Gov. Chris Christie’s office, joked about causing traffic problems for Rabbi Mendy Carlebach of the Chabad of North and South Brunswick. Carlebach, who is Orthodox and a close Christie ally, is a chaplain for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department. 
 
 "And he has officially pissed me off," Wildstein told Kelly in a text message. 
 
 "Clearly," Kelly wrote. "We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?" 
 
 Wildstein replied, "Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed." 
 
 "Perfect," Kelly wrote. 
 
 Wisniewski said he had not spoken to Carlebach and did not understand why Wildstein and Kelly would have wanted to cause him trouble. He said it was “inappropriate” for government officials to talk about a religious leader in that way, and that it “speaks to the need to reform this agency.” 
 
 “It seems like they really felt comfortable in talking about how they could utilize their authority to apparently get back at people, which is disturbing,” he said. 
 
 The 20 pages of documents, released today, also reveal that Kelly was the unidentified recipient of many of the text messages originally provided by Wildstein, the former director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority. The committee’s attorney, Reid Schar, negotiated the release of the records with Wildstein’s attorney, Alan Zegas. 
 
 Wisniewski said most of the documents were redacted appropriately because they had nothing to do with the September closing of lanes leading to the bridge in Fort Lee — something Democrats have called an act of politically retaliation against the borough’s mayor. 
 
 One redaction, for instance, was of text messages about a crane failure on a Port Authority job, he said. 
 
 “Not part of this investigation, not part of what we’re looking at,” Wisniewski said. “We don’t need to see that.”
– A big batch of emails among current and former Chris Christie aides is out, and while no bombshells appear to be in the mix, one exchange in particular is getting a lot of attention. Weeks before bridgegate, Christie's then deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, joked with former Port Authority official David Wildstein about a local rabbi, Mendy Carlebach. It begins with Wildstein emailing a photo of Carlebach. Wildstein: "And he has officially pissed me off." (It's not clear why.) Kelly: "Clearly. We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?" Wildstein: "Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed." Kelly: "Perfect." The Star-Ledger quotes state Assemblyman John Wisniewski, who is leading an investigation into the Fort Lee traffic mess, as saying the emails show a "kind of a juvenile, cavalier attitude toward their official responsibilities and joking about the power they had to create traffic or delay flights.” The New York Times story includes a similar take: The emails "lend new context to the highly charged environment in which Mr. Christie’s aides operated, an atmosphere of political paybacks where the planned lane closings for Fort Lee could be joked about as a weapon to be wielded against people who irked or defied them." As for the rabbi, he's bewildered. "I have totally no idea," he tells the Bergen Record when asked what he did to tick off the aides. "None of it makes any sense."