New Jersey US Attorney Paul Fishman and state legislators are reportedly investigating on who have issued an order to close the access lanes at the George Washington Bridge from September 9 to September 12 in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Bloomberg said that the lawmakers and prosecutors are having a hard time to decide whether to give immunity to former loyalists to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to entice them into revealing their knowledge about the lane closings. This was so because they are at a dilemma whether offering immunity would be the best path to take in order to obtain the truth about the potential crime, and who had ordered it.
Peter Zeidenberg, who had aided in the prosecution of former vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, said, "The government doesn't like to give immunity if they can avoid it, because witnesses at trial can be attacked as having been bought, and they can't be trusted. But immunized witnesses testify all the time, and people are convicted all the time based on their testimony, as long as it's corroborated."
Fishman's prosecutors reportedly had taken grand jury testimony, issued subpoenas to obtain documents related to the lane closures and reviewed materials that were gathered by lawmakers. Zeidenberg, like other former prosecutors who have observed the Bridgegate, said the it is unlikely that Fishman will grant immunity as the former is leaning to hold people on criminal charges.
Former federal prosecutor Richard Owens in New York said, "An attorney who comes in early on in an investigation who says, ‘My client can open the door to these other eight episodes,' has a lot more bargaining power because they have a lot more value as a witness. If it's late in the day and there are already other sources of information available to them, prosecutors might not strike that bargain so easily."
The Gibson Dunn internal probe commissioned by Christie had put the blame on the governor's former deputy chief Bridget Anne Kelly and former high-ranking official David Wildstein at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as the people behind the tie-ups. However, Bloomberg noted that the law firm who had conducted the probe did not speak to either of the two, nor several other figures key to the scandal.
