New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Sunday contrasted his response to the “Bridgegate” scandal in his state with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s scramble to reduce the political damage from her use of a private email server at the State Department, daring her to be more transparent as new information about her unusual arrangement trickles out.
Mr. Christie, a Republican contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, said he fired staff and took reporters’ questions upon learning his administration was linked to traffic jams that made it hard for motorists to get onto the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey.
“What really matters, as Hillary Clinton is finding out, is how you react to a crisis,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Not that there never will be any crises, but how you react to it. When we had a crisis, the next day I went out and took questions for an hour and 15 minutes, no holds barred. Let’s wait to see if Mrs. Clinton every does one-fifth of that on her crisis.”
Over the weekend, the company in charge of Mrs. Clinton’s private server said there’s no indication the system was wiped clean, meaning investigators may still recover personal messages that the 2016 Democratic front-runner said she had deleted, leaving the impression they were gone.
The revelation, first reported by the Washington Post, underscored the difference between content that’s simply deleted from a computer and overwriting the data from the server to make sure it goes away forever.
A spokesman for Platte River Networks, the Denver firm that’s managed Mrs. Clinton’s server since 2013, told the Post it has “no knowledge of the server being wiped.”
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The revelation comes as House investigators and Republican candidates for president step up their attacks on Mrs. Clinton, and as she fends off Democratic competition from Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, and talk of a run by Vice President Joseph R. Biden.
Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle has been affected by the email probe, too.
Her close personal aide, Huma Abedin, has turned over more than 6,714 emails, and 2,533 paged of documents in printed and electronic form, the Obama administration said in a court filing late Friday.
Most of those materials were turned over Sept. 1, and though the majority came in electronic form already, they will still need to be converted to a searchable format, the State Department said. The department said it will take 60 days to convert the messages, process them and begin releasing responsive documents.
Still, that’s a far better situation than the 55,000 pages of emails Mrs. Clinton turned over in December, which took five months for the government to scan in, and which will take through January for them all to be released.
In other developments Friday, the Obama administration lost its bids to halt other Clinton email cases, with Judge Emmet G. Sullivan denying requests to stay searches in three separate cases.
Facing more than 30 open-records cases seeking emails from Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and other top aides Cheryl Mills, Philippe Reines and Jacob Sullivan, the Justice Department has asked that most of those searches be halted and that the matter be coordinated by a single judge.
But Judge Sullivan said the cases are making headway, and he doesn’t see a need to halt them.
“Neither judicial economy nor the interests of justice will be served by staying this matter at this time,” he wrote in an order in one of the three cases.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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