Ever since Chris Christie’s Bridgegate broke, opponents have been rummaging around for other sins.
Now they think they’ve found a winner: Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer’s claim the Christie administration held Superstorm Sandy recovery funds for her city hostage to her support for a local redevelopment.
Mayor Zimmer says the threat was delivered last May by Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno in a “direct message from the governor.” Such was the shock, she says she wrote in her diary, it “literally brings tears to my eyes.”
Guadagno denies it, and there are troubling aspects about Zimmer’s account. For one thing, if she did indeed write in her diary Christie was “cut from the same corrupt cloth that I have been fighting,” why did she tweet in August “very glad Governor Christie has been our Gov.”?
Even after the GWB scandal surfaced, she mentioned nothing about Guadagno’s supposed threat. She questioned only whether any lack of Sandy funds was connected to her remaining neutral in Christie’s re-election race. She continues to complain she’s “not satisfied with the amount of money” she’s received, with Christie’s folks noting she’s asked for $100 million of a chunk of federal aid that totaled about $300 million.
Our question is the same one others have been asking: Why did she wait until now to come forward? Zimmer says she thought no one would believe her.
That’s a pretty weak excuse. If what she says is true, it would mean she kept quiet and denied constituents relief when they needed her voice and that aid most.
Isn’t that an abuse of power, too?