Bridgegate email: 'Hasty and ill-advised'

The New Jersey Legislature has released more than 2,000 pages of documents related to the controversial closure of the George Washington Bridge .

The New Jersey Legislature has released more than 2,000 pages of documents related to the controversial closure of the George Washington Bridge .

They were made public two days after damning e-mails surfaced suggesting top aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were involved– allegedly to punish  Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor.

Below are some of the striking details from the document dump. They were entered into public record during a New Jersey Assembly Transportation Committee hearing, in which David Wildstein, a Christie-appointed executive at the Port Authority (which controls the bridge) repeatedly pled the Fifth Amendment. He has since resigned.

A ‘hasty and ill-advised decision’: Patrick Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority appointed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo–who testified he had no idea about any traffic study—expressed concern that drivers weren’t warned about the decision to close the lanes.  He sent a scathing email to Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni, characterizing the closures as a “hasty and ill-advised decision” that may have violated both state and federal law. Some in the Christie administration claimed the lane closing were for a traffic study.  When Foye said “Bill, we are going to fix this fiasco,” Baroni said “There can be no public discourse.” Baroni has since resigned.

It was an ‘abusive’ decision: Foye also expressed concern for the public’s safety. “I pray that no life has been lost or trip of a hospital – or hospice-bound patient delayed.” He also said “I will get to the bottom of this abusive decision which violated everything this agency stands for.”

Complaints started rolling in on Day 1: On Sept. 9, Robert Durando, the general manager of the bridge, forwarded an email to what appeared to be Port Authority employees to give them a “flavor of the complaints.” One patron said the Port Authority “doesn’t care about their customers and they are playing God with people’s jobs,” noting her husband was 40 minutes late to a job that he just got after being unemployed for a year.

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Christie, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, is trying to get ahead of the scandal. He insisted he had nothing to do with the closures, and at a Thursday press conference he said he was “embarrassed and humiliated.” The governor fired Bridget Anne Kelly, a deputy chief of staff who was involved in the chaotic traffic jams, for lying to him.

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Meanwhile, six New Jersey residents are already suing over ‘Bridgegate.’ The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Newark, seeks damages on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim they lost wages and were late to work because of the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, one of the busiest bridges in the world. The plaintiffs called the bridge plot “willful, wanton, arbitrary, and egregious official misconduct,” the .“ Defendants in the case include Christie; his former deputy chief of staff Bridget Ann Kelly, who has been implicated in the traffic scheme; and two former Port Authority officials, according to the report.

Jane Timm and NBC News contributed to this report.