Calls mount for bridge scandal probe

New Jersey state Sen. Ray Lesniak (D) is calling for a formal investigation into the George Washington Bridge scandal, saying it involves “reckless endangerment of people’s live and possibly criminally negligent homicide.”

{mosads}He made the comment Thursday on CNN’s “New Day” program. Lesniak is joining with state Sen. Barbara Buono, who challenged Gov. Chris Christie (R) in the last election, to demand that the U.S. attorney’s office look into the case.

Emails revealed Wednesday that one of Christie’s top aides requested for a traffic jam to be created around the bridge in Fort Lee, N.J. The exchanges indicate Christie’s staffers were exacting political retribution toward that town’s mayor, a Democrat, who didn’t endorse Christie in last year’s election.

“Wow! Time for a federal grand jury. This smells of corrupt use of government authority at the highest levels,” Lesniak wrote on his Facebook page Wednesday.

A report in The Bergen County Record said the closures caught emergency vehicles in a traffic jam on the bridge, including a group of paramedics who were trying to reach a 91-year-old unconscious woman. That woman later died at a hospital of cardiac arrest, the report said.

An investigation must be done, Lesniak says, because someone died as a result of “abusive government authority.”

“This a governor who has said to national Republicans ‘we should do whatever it takes to win.’ He set the tone in his administration for whatever it takes to win, and obviously people took that way too far,” Lesniak said.

Read more on The Hill.