Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up

Matt Katz and Andrea Bernstein report for WNYC:

The governors of New York and New Jersey were involved in covering up Bridgegate early on, star witness David Wildstein said in federal court in Newark Tuesday.

Wildstein testified last week that he and defendant Bill Baroni bragged to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the lane closures while they were going on.

In federal court Tuesday, Wildstein fingered New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as well, saying it was his “understanding that Gov. Christie and Gov. Cuomo discussed” putting together a false report as early as October 2013, shortly after the lane closures, saying “that the New Jersey side accepted responsibility.”

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>
The idea was that the New York appointees of the Port Authority would sign off on the cover story as a “traffic study” gone awry, and that would be that.

By that point in time, senior officials on both sides of the Hudson River knew there had been no “traffic study.” High-ranking Christie and Cuomo staffers were in communication about the lane closures, Wildstein testified. Wildstein said he understood that Cuomo instructed his top appointee, Pat Foye, to “lay off” Christie.

According to Wildstein, this report became the basis for Bridgegate defendant Bill Baroni’s subsequent false testimony to the legislature. The report was not otherwise released. The timing is key: the alleged collusion between the governors came months before Cuomo said he only knew “basically what has been in the newspapers.”

Read the full story here

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>

Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up Read More »

Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up

Matt Katz and Andrea Bernstein report for WNYC:

The governors of New York and New Jersey were involved in covering up Bridgegate early on, star witness David Wildstein said in federal court in Newark Tuesday.

Wildstein testified last week that he and defendant Bill Baroni bragged to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the lane closures while they were going on.

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column –>>

The idea was that the New York appointees of the Port Authority would sign off on the cover story as a “traffic study” gone awry, and that would be that.

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>

Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up Read More »

Great Adventure holds off on tree clearing for solar farm

Tom Johnson reports today for NJ Spotlight:

Great Adventure will not be cutting down any trees to build a huge solar farm — at least not anytime soon.

Six Flags, the parent company of the amusement park, agreed to hold off clearing 66 acres of woodland where it has won approval to build one of the state’s largest solar facilities until a court case contesting the plan is decided.

The decision marks a small victory for an array of state environmental organizations, which had sought to block the project put forward by the amusement park and solar developer KDC Solar. If allowed to go forward, as many as 16,000 trees would be cut down, according to foes.

The move is in response to an injunction filed with the court by opponents of the project, who include the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, New Jersey Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, Environment New Jersey, Save Barnegat Bay, and others.

The proposal would allow the park to build a 21.9-megawatt solar facility — enough to power about 3,000 homes — on forested land located between two major wildlife refuges. The project won approval from Jackson Township in March 2015.

In their initial lawsuit, the environmental groups argued the project violates Jackson Township’s master plan and a local tree-removal ordinance, which sets explicit regulations for tree preservation and removal.

The opponents also contended that the project is at odds with the state’s Energy Master Plan, which recommends that large solar projects avoid being located on existing open space and farmland and instead targeted to brownfields and closed garbage dumps.

Great Adventure should have heeded recommendations to relocate the project above the park’s parking lot, an option considered but largely rejected by the company. The project ultimately moved a small portion of the solar arrays to the parking facility.

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, one of the groups challenging the approval, argued that the township ignored its own planning regulations. “This area is clearly environmentally sensitive, contains threatened and endangered species, and protects water quality,’’ he said.

The court is not expected to render a decision in the case until the end of the year.

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>

Great Adventure holds off on tree clearing for solar farm Read More »

The Arctic is being utterly transformed

A collage of melting sea ice in the Kane Basin between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere
Island in August of 2016. (Chris Mooney for the Washington Post.

It’s the fastest-warming part of the planet — and the impacts will be felt far, far afield. Among many other assorted impacts, the rapidly melting Arctic is expected to flood shorelines as Greenland loses ice more and more rapidly (it contains some 20 feet of potential sea level rise), further pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as permafrost thaws, and become a global heat sink as a once ice-covered ocean exposes more and more dark water.

Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

No wonder, perhaps, that on Wednesday, the outgoing Obama administration convened top science policymakers from 25 other Arctic and non-Arctic nations, as well as representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples, in a first-ever Arctic Science Ministerial to coordinate study of what the consequences will be as the Arctic heats up much more rapidly than the more temperate latitudes or the equator.

“The temperature is increasing between 2 and 5 times as fast, depending on where in the Arctic you are,” said physicist John Holdren, who heads the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and is Obama’s science adviser, and is chairing the meeting.

We know this in broad outline, Holdren said, but our knowledge comes up short in many areas when it comes to more precisely observing what is happening in the remote and at times dangerous Arctic region, and being able to run simulations, or computer models, to chart the consequences.

“Basically, the whole Arctic is under-instrumented,” said Holdren. “The observation networks are too sparse in geographic extent, they’re too discontinuous in time, they’re not measuring everywhere all the things they should be measuring. We can’t say, for example, how much CO2 and methane emissions from the Arctic are actually going up. We know they are going up but we don’t really have a good handle on how fast and from precisely where.”

In conjunction with the ministerial, the White House announced the release of a new satellite-based dataset that maps elevations across the Arctic at a resolution of 8 meters, with an expected further improvement to 2 meters next year. This is highly scientifically valuable because it will mean that researchers will be able to remotely detect the slumping of glaciers and permafrost and the vulnerability of different locations to rising seas.

[These gorgeous new Alaska maps could transform our understanding of the Arctic]

Also on Wednesday, global ministers announced a number of science projects including a new Integrated Arctic Observing System to be put in place by the European Union and a U.S. National Science Foundation project, called “Eyes North,” to record and evaluate the large volume of environmental changes being observed by the Arctic’s indigenous peoples in and around their communities.

Read the full story here

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>

The Arctic is being utterly transformed Read More »

Whitewater investigator Michael Chertoff backs Clinton

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, center, accompanied by former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olson, right, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, left, attends a National Security working session in New York Sept. 9, 2016. (Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)Add caption

Eliza Collins reports for USA TODAY:

Michael Chertoff, once the lead Republican counsel on the Senate committee investigating the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal, is now officially backing Hillary Clinton for president.

Chertoff, who went on to become the secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, told Bloomberg View over the weekend that he made the decision because of the importance of national security.

“I realized we spent a huge amount of time in the ’90s on issues that were much less important than what was brewing in terms of terrorism,” he said.

Chertoff also said that while the Clintons have made some mistakes they dwarf in comparison to the need for national security.

“People can go back decades and perhaps criticize some of the judgments that were made [in the 90s],” Chertoff said. “That is very, very insignificant compared to the fundamental issue of how to protect the country.”

_____________________________________

Chertoff was born in Elizabeth, NJ and served as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1990 to 1994 – Editor_____________________________________
Whitewater was a probe into a land deal the Clintons were involved in shortly before Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. The investigation didn’t turn up anything, but it spawned other investigations into the Clintons that wound up uncovering Bill’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, leading to his impeachment by the House.

In his interview over the weekend, Chertoff addressed Clinton’s use of a private server specifically, telling Bloomberg that it was a mistake, but “she did not intentionally endanger national security.”

Chertoff previously signed a letter warning of the consequences of Trump presidency to national security but his decision to publicly back Clinton came after last week’s debate.

“Trump’s sense of loyalties are misplaced,” he said. He added that the way Trump has handled the situation with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado — he has defended calling her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” and went on a Twitter tirade in the wee hours of the morning last week — brings up concerns of impulse control.

“Not only did he seem at the debate to lose his temper, but to get up at 3:30 a.m. and reach for your smartphone is to me a hysterical reaction. If you’re president, the button you reach for is not the Twitter button; it’s the nuclear button,” he said.

Earlier this month Clinton met with Chertoff and a group of other bipartisan national security officials.

Like this? Use form in upper right to receive free updates

See popular posts from the last 30 days in right column — >>

Whitewater investigator Michael Chertoff backs Clinton Read More »

Trump tax story: How NYT got it; Chris, Rudy play defense

The BIG weekend story is Donald Trump’s 1995 tax records that reportedly show a loss so massive from his failed casino, airline and hotel businesses that it would have permitted him to make no tax payments for years. Here’s the fascinating story from New York Times reporter Susanne Craig on how her newspaper got hold of the tax information and how they checked it out:

The Time I Found Donald Trump’s Tax Records in My Mailbox

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a top adviser to Mr. Trump,
and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani shared the unenviable task of explaining on the Sunday morning talk shows how the Times story was ‘actually a good story’ for Trump.