Where the report deals with Ms.
Kelly and yet claims that it need not have interviewed her, but that it was
sufficient to rely on documents, on this I have the same thought as I had about
the larger report, when it was repeatedly remarked in news items yesterday that
the legal investigation by the report’s authors did not include interviews with
any of the principal people (Kelly and David Wildstein) who the report claims
were the ones responsible for the bridge lane closures (Bill Baroni and Bill
Stepien also weren’t interviewed—see here): Typical lawyer precept: rely all on documents, don’t think you need to
have any intuitive or personal grasp on the matters at issue, derived from
contact with the principal people about whom there were central allegations.
These attorneys would have made good Soviet functionaries.
Moreover, in the U.S. justice system,
anyone boned up on it knows that interviews, in-person testimony, and so on are
essential to the working of a “trial,” which is the final “court of recourse”
in many legal matters. Where “witnessing-type facts” are concerned, documents,
though important, may not be enough; personal witnesses able to be interrogated
(or subject to cross-examination) are crucial. So in no regard was this report
the outcome of a “trial.” (Granted, the central players the report pins blame
on chose not to be interviewed, as was their right under the advice of counsel.
The report should then have had the discretion to state its limitedness in this
regard, rather than be presented as a kind of final word.)
In my experience, in any
difficult situation involving an abuse of some kind of power, even if a female
involved were arguably “unstable” in some sense (and regarding Ms. Kelly, in my
closely reading on her part in this mess, instability
was not the first character aspect I would have sought out as significant for explaining her role; my first choice
would have been conformism in line with authority she believed in), it has
long been my policy to be as even-handed as possible, even if some rhetoric I presented
at some stage of the “inquest” sounds a little more “sexist” than some would
like. In the most difficult “investigations” I’ve been part of where a major
player (if not malefactor) was female, I have tried to have evidence
representing the female’s spontaneous view as much as possible. Sometimes this
is reflected in documents of some sort, and in situations where a kind of clear-enough
conspiracy is involved, it becomes a tricky art to tease out strongly relevant
documents from ones that reflect more personal foibles that aren’t very
relevant to the issue at hand. When one is limited to just documents, you try
to marshal documents that give the fullest and most relevant portrait you can.
This doesn’t seem, at an early stage of my review, to be what the Mastro report did with Ms. Kelly.
Dark-ish remarks I have presented
in specific matters—even remarks that may seem vaguely misogynist—are just me
adding “grumpy grace notes” partly to salve my sense of being old and tired
(and having an atypical experience of significant women, to put it very
generally), and to exercise a little humor that obviously may not appeal to
all, as I deal with an array of ongoing challenges; but in no way would they be the essence or central “pillars” of a finding in
some big issue.
All things considered about Gov.
Christie’s career, how he’s handled this Bridgegate investigation—and Ms. Kelly
in particular—isn’t entirely surprising. And of course, the full investigation
is still underway.
