It took exactly one, tersely worded email to blow the lid off Chris Christie\u2019s \u201cBridge-gate\u201d scandal. The now infamous \u201cTime for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee\u201d email from Christie\u2019s deputy chief-of-staff, Bridget Ann Kelly, to David Wildstein at the Port Authority set in motion the politically engineered traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, the four-days of massive inconvenience to New Jersey citizens, and the potentially politically disastrous revelations about it.<\/p>\n

Without that seven-word note [eight, if you count Ft. and Lee as two separate words], it\u2019s likely that we\u2019d know nothing about what happened behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

So, why the hell did Bridget Kelly send that damning email?<\/p>\n

To me, it\u2019s all about old-school vs. new-school communications. In a previous world order, before email\/Facebook\/texting\/Twitter, if you had something\u2014especially something incriminating\u2014that you wanted to tell a co-worker, you\u2019d either pick up the phone and call his\/her extension, or you\u2019d walk across the hall to his or her office, or meet at an out-of-the-way caf\u00e9 or bar or parking garage, and communicate face-to-face. (If you were an idiot, you might put your secret information in a memo and either send it through the office mail system, put a postage stamp [what\u2019s that, again?] on it and drop it in a mailbox, or put it on your co-worker\u2019s desk.) \u00a0But that\u2019s old school, antiquated, quaint, slow\u2014and, by the way, less traceable.<\/p>\n

So, there it is: If Kelly and her co-conspirators had simply called each other, or had a secret meeting, or walked across the hall, the whole thing might have remained under the radar. It\u2019s a lot harder to subpoena a phone conversation [unless, of course, you\u2019re the NSA or the FBI or the FISA court, and I doubt that any of those organizations were giving a hoot\u2014at the time– about the inner workings of Chris Christie\u2019s office or of his politically vengeful mind.] Old-style incriminating memos\u2014with no carbon copies [what are those?]\u2014can be burned or otherwise destroyed, and with them\u2014poof!\u2014the evidence of conspiracy or other wrongdoings.<\/p>\n

But new-school communications are the way it is. It\u2019s easier. It\u2019s faster, it\u2019s freakin\u2019 instantaneous. And that\u2019s the way we like it\u2014until something like Bridge-gate happens. I suspect that\u2019s what occurred here. \u00a0Electronic communications are the default, the way most staffers like Bridget have been doing things since day one, and who can blame a generation raised on speedy, keystroke communications from using the technology that\u2019s available?<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the need for speed makes it too easy to forget that technology is not always our friend: Richard Nixon fell in love with the idea of recording his conversations for posterity on an audiotaping system\u2014state-of-the-art at the time\u2014and look what happened to him.<\/p>\n

But maybe there\u2019s a lesson to be learned from all of this\u2014even if you\u2019re not doing something wrong. (One could speculate, of course, that Kelly et al<\/em> didn\u2019t think what they were doing was in any way nefarious or in need of concealment\u2014maybe dirty tricks and political retribution were simply part of the atmosphere in the Christie administration\u2014part of his no-nonsense, tough-guy cachet\u2014and didn\u2019t need to be hidden.) It might be helpful, even in seemingly innocent circumstances, to pause before sending and to consider whether what we\u2019re about to say electronically might be better said face-to-face.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll bet Bridget Ann Kelly is thinking that right now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took exactly one, tersely worded email to blow the lid off Chris Christie\u2019s \u201cBridge-gate\u201d scandal. The now infamous \u201cTime for some traffic problems<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2119,1726,661,1868,128,1949,16,1253,241],"tags":[1692,2187,2188],"yoast_head":"\n