Sitting Down With Bridget Kelly: What Needs to Be Said

The following is a short monologue that needs to be delivered within the next week by the U.S. Attorney to Ms. Bridget Anne Kelly, former Deputy Chief of Staff for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

“First Ms. Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time out this morning to speak to us. Before I begin, I hope that you are well aware of your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, and I do see your attorney is present. So I'll try to make this short and to the point.

We have clear evidence that you were intimately involved in a specific and, dare I say, well-executed conspiracy to create a nightmarish traffic and logistical bottleneck at the George Washington Bridge. This was in done in order to create an atmosphere of fear and punishment for the people and officials of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a town which directly borders the bridge. In these efforts, you and/or your co-conspirators were immensely successful. Not only did you tie up traffic, cost people and businesses millions of dollars in delays and fuel but someone actually died. Additionally, your actions placed the entire region, its population and economy at risk as, and I'm sure you're aware, the bridge represents a strategic bottleneck in the Northeast corridor.

So this is what the Federal Government is prepared to offer you. To remain a free person, all you have to do is answer this question, as we find it hard to believe that – and I do not mean to insult you here – a relatively low-level Trenton staffer would be capable of not only giving these plainly illegal orders, but actually getting high ranking officials to follow them, and then cover the entire thing up. So, answer this: Were you ordered or encouraged by anyone else in the Governor's office, including the Governor himself, to commit this act?

Now please do not answer right away. There's one more thing I need to make clear with you, as a professional, mother and citizen.

The United States government is preparing to charge you with committing an act of domestic terrorism, conspiracy, as well as intentional disruption of interstate commerce. The last two charges wouldn't bring about the end of your world, but the first one would. See, what you did was clearly an act of terror, and a comprehensive one at that. I'm prepared to ask a judge and jury to put you in prison for the rest of your life, and fine your family into oblivion, because, again, you committed this act from a position of power in order to spread fear. So while you're not exactly Osama Bin Laden, in disrupting and choking the bridge, in spreading mass havoc and panic, for a few hours your aims and those of Al Qaida were exactly the same.

Anyway, enough of my talking here...what say you?"