Friends closed ranks Friday around Gov. Chris Christie’s ousted aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, claiming the suburban mom who set off Bridgegate with an e-mail is a “scapegoat.’’
“Bridget is wonderful. She’s a great mother, a wonderful friend,’’ a supporter wrote on the Facebook page of the Patch.com news site in Ramsey, NJ, where the divorced Kelly lives with her four kids and where she once headed the local Republican Party.
“Bridget is a woman of honor, decorum and integrity,’’ piped in another commenter, Patty Swanton Snyder.
“I am appalled that she is being made a scapegoat of all this. I fully support her.”
“The young lady did not just wake up one morning, when you see the e-mails, she didn’t just wake up one morning and decide let’s screw up the traffic in Fort Lee,” former colleague and ex-Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. told North Jersey.com.
Several Facebook posters were outraged by the media scrutiny, saying stories about Kelly’s spectacular professional flameout would hurt Kelly’s four kids, ages 7 to 17.
“She knows we support her,’’ one pal wrote.
“This is all personal, between us and Bridget.”
Poster Trish Manduley Hurley posted that she doesn’t know Kelly personally, but was angry at the coverage, saying, “It is impossible to know exactly who knew what was being done and who told who to do it.”
“How would someone from Ramsey know how to block traffic at the GWB?” wrote Anthony Iannearelli, suggesting that Kelly wasn’t the mastermind.
Not everyone was willing to cut Kelly slack.
“She knew what she was doing and I believe she did it on purpose,’’ said Ignacio Tonito Rodriguez. “What I don’t understand is how can a mother write e-mails like that about children’s safety/education.’’
In one e-mail exchange included in the Wednesday document release, the bridge shutdown collaborators joke about kids being stuck on school buses, saying it didn’t matter because they were the kids of Christie gubernatorial challenger Barbara Buono.