WASHINGTON – Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and other top Republicans labored Sunday to defend embattled New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“He says he didn’t know. I think it’s pretty darn credible,” Giuliani said on ABC’s “This Week,” bolstering Christie’s claim that a rogue aide ordered traffic-snarling lane closures on the GW Bridge in September as political payback.
“He wouldn’t make this blanket denial unless it’s not true,” insisted Giuliani, adding that by doing so Christie willingly “put his political career completely at risk.”
Before the scandal, Christie was considered an early frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus applauded Christie for showing “leadership” when the governor apologized profusely at a marathon press conference Thursday.
“We all make mistakes. But the real question is, what do you do when mistakes happen,” Priebus said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“He stood there for 111 minutes in an open dialogue with the press,” he said. “Only if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would give us 111 seconds of that would we find out some things that we want to find out about ObamaCare, Benghazi [and] the IRS.”
Similarly, Giuliani compared Christie’s situation to Obama’s purported lack of knowledge about the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups and the al Qaeda link to the deadly attack on the US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
“The reality is you miss a lot of thing when you are running a government that is as complicated New Jersey, New York or the United States,” said Giuliani.
Christie’s political foes also refrained from blasting the wounded governor.
Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, who was the alleged target of the traffic-jam payback, said on the NBC show that he would take Chrisite “at his word.”
But the Democratic mayor called Christie’s claim of ignorance “a tough pill to swallow.”
“This issue is whether he knew. But if he didn’t know, he certainly should have known, and I think that’s the catch-22 here,” said Sololich.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential Republican rival for the GOP presidential nomination, refused to comment on the scandal.
“We don’t know all the facts. I think this is a story that’s still developing and we should reserve judgment,” Rubio said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a potential Democratic presidential hopeful in 2016, also backed off.
“I don’t know if I could really shed more light on it,” O’Malley told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Pressed on whether it was plausible that Christie didn’t know what was going on in his administration, O’Malley responded: “There’s certainly no issue that bothers our citizens as much as traffic congestion.”