Rudy Giuliani doesn’t blame Chris Christie for Bridgegate, and thinks the traffic scandal is the kind of thing that inevitably happens in government. Christie “wouldn’t make this blanket denial” if he had known what was going on, he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz.
But “he had to know there was all that traffic,” Raddatz pushed the former New York City mayor. Giuliani, however, said that such a minor event is easy for a governor to miss, especially during campaign season. The media, he contended, usually accepts the explanation that an executive didn’t know what his underlings were doing: “It’s happened to the present president at least three or four times.”
When Raddatz pressed him on the culture of Christie’s office, asking whether he can be blamed for making it seem like such meddling was acceptable, Giuliani said that nearly any administration can be held culpable in such a way. “People in the IRS thought President Obama wanted them to” to target conservative political organizations, for instance, he said.
All of this, though, hinges on the idea that Christie has been honest that he had nothing to do with the scandal: Otherwise, Giuliani says, “the man has put his political career completely at risk.”