Following the select committee legislative hearing for the George Washington Bridge lane closure investigation, Assemblyman John Wisniewski told NJTV News Managing Editor Mike Schneider that the committee needs to “robustly pursue” answers in order to wrap up the investigation in an efficient manner.
Wisniewski said that at the start of the investigation, he did not anticipate having emails that led back to Gov. Chris Christie’s office, so he does not know where the investigation is going to lead.
“What we are going to do is follow the information that we have to date, which is an email from Bridget Kelly to David Wildstein and a response. We need to understand why she would send that and abuse her power as the deputy chief of staff and why there was such a robust effort to try to conceal what had happened by creating a cover story of a traffic study. We are going to follow those leads wherever they go,” Wisniewski said.
There are some people that want to limit the scope of the investigation and may not want to get all of the answers, according to Wisniewski, but it is the obligation of the legislators to figure out why the abuse of power happened and to keep it from happening again, he said.
He said that if the scope of the investigation is limited, the answers that could be obtained would be limited as well. Wisniewski said that people should not be afraid of the truth and should not be worried about the answers that are found.
“We ought to robustly pursue the answers to the questions that we have and try to expeditiously wrap this up. I think by needlessly bureaucratizing the process, we are only going to slow it down and that’s not what the public wants. The public wants accountability,” Wisniewski said.
Wisniewski said that he trusts that everyone on the committee is working in good faith and they want to get to the bottom of the incident. “We have have a role to play in making sure that we get to answers we need,” Wisniewski said.
He said that he does not know how long the investigation will take. “We also want to be mindful that when the Assembly Transportation Committee started looking at the Port Authority, we had received a one-year authority to issue subpoenas. We quickly learned that the people we issued subpoenas to would just try and run out the clock. We can’t allow that to happen in this investigation. We need to get answers,” Wisniewski said.
Full cooperation from all of the individuals and organizations that were sent subpoenas would expedite the process and help give the committee the tools to have their questions answered because they can only deal with what they are given, Wisniewski said.
“We are no longer just looking at the Port Authority. We are looking at an abuse of power and we are not sure where it ends up or who else is responsible but to limit the committee’s inquiry would by definition, limit the answers we can get and leave unexamined a whole host of questions that the public wants answers to,” Wisniewski said.
Wisniewski said that no new subpoenas have been issued since the last 20 were handed out. Right now, to avoid any legal challenges, the committee reissued the same subpoenas to the same individuals and organization, with the same return days, and requested the same material, Wisniewski said.
“There’s no intention or plan right now to issue any additional subpoenas. We will have to wait until we get responses to the original 20 subpoenas, see what information is provided and see what questions we need to have answered next,” Wisniewski said.