- Ted, it's good to be with you.

There is so much new information to unpack surrounding the closure of the Washington Bridge.

It's hard to believe, but we're approaching the two-month mark since the westbound side of the bridge was really abruptly shut down.

- Yeah, I remember, Michelle, I was in the newsroom at like four o'clock, about an hour before it happened.

I got a text from a source who said, "You're gonna want to be at your desk.

We have some big news coming."

And I said, "What?"

He said, "We're gonna have to close the Washington Bridge."

And I said, "We can't be closing the whole Washington Bridge.

That would be so disruptive."

And they were like, "That's why I'm texting you."

- Just wait and see.

- Yeah, exactly.

And so, and here we are now two months in, we don't even know how long it's gonna be closed anymore.

- And this is no longer just a Rhode Island issue.

Now, the federal government's involved.

It's been about a week since Governor McKee received this letter from the Department of Justice saying, "We're looking into any potential violations of federal contracting laws."

We wanna see basically, was there any fraud committed?

And it's interesting because the governor learned about this, but waited upon your reporting more than seven hours before divulging that to the public.

What do you make of that?

- Well, It's frustrating, right?

There is an old tradition in the news business of the Friday night news dump, where a government or a business puts out bad news Friday night, 'cause they know fewer reporters are working and the public's not paying as much attention.

Now, in fairness, the governor insists that's not what happened here.

He says it took all day to review it so that they could release it to the media.

But you know, that was a source of frustration.

And then when we finally did get the letter Friday night, like eight o'clock, they finally released the letter itself, it was interesting to see what they're looking for.

The feds want documents up the bridge, not just from the last month or two, all the way back to 2015.

- Why 2015?

- I don't know.

But the first thought I had was that is Peter Alviti's entire tenure as director of the Department of Transportation, both for McKee and Gina Raimondo before him.

Now, Attorney General Neronha, who's really no fan of McKee, but was the state stop prosecutor, he actually cautioned against reading too much into the letter.

He said, "With all the federal money in the bridge, it's not a shock that the feds would at least be asking for documents, taking a look."

But I still think just the headline's been a black eye for everyone involved.

There was a quote from House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Patricia Serpa to one of my colleagues.

She said, "The fact that Department of Justice has an investigation doesn't make me feel very good."

- We've also seen a change in tone from the governor.

He was in meetings all last weekend.

We know that he was supposed to attend the ribbon cutting for the new Narragansett Library.

He did not attend.

And then you go back to Monday, he announced that he's sending Joseph Almond, his senior deputy chief of staff over to RIDOT, basically to monitor the handling of this bridge closure.

Have you noticed a change in the governor since the letter from the DOJ?

- Yeah, I think I have for sure, Michelle.

I mean, not only did you have the Monday after that Friday night release of this DOJ letter, the announcement that Joe Almond's being sent over to RIDOT to monitor everything and coordinate it all.

Also, the governor announcing he'd had another call with FEMA, kind of beseeching them for flexibility to provide more federal emergency funding to Rhode Island, which they've said so far, Rhode Island doesn't qualify for.

I think the other factor, of course, isn't just the DOJ letter, but the fact that was the same week we found out, finally publicly, that the bridge might have to be entirely rebuilt.

We've gone from a three-month closure for some quick repairs to this bridge might be unusable, and who knows how long that could take.

I mean, it took almost a decade to fix the eastbound side of the Washington Bridge.

So I think that also was a sort of a wake up call to the governor's office.

Like what are we really talking about here?

- Yeah.

Another big development has been these emails that we've had from RIDOT employees that you and your colleagues at WPRI requested, along with other reporters from other media outlets.

And it's interesting because engineers at RIDOT privately acknowledged in these emails that the section of the bridge that led to the closure had been hard to see until construction work made it noticeable, which begs the question, how did this bridge pass inspection last July?

- And that's a question everyone has, right?

Was it just that you couldn't see the broken parts of the bridge and now you could, and that's why it had to be closed?

So was it already broken?

What does that tell us about the inspection process?

We are getting those questions a lot, and we don't have answers to them.

- What also struck me is whose emails we weren't seeing?

- (laughs) Yeah.

So there were no emails in this document dump, Michelle, from RIDOT Director Peter Alviti, no emails from his chief of staff, John Igliozzi, who of course is a potential candidate for Attorney General in a couple years, so there's scrutiny on him as well.

It left me wondering, did they send no emails about the bridge in that period?

Are they being withheld?

- And the time period is when?

- We asked for emails from December 7th, the day the problem was identified to a couple days after the bridge closed, so a period you'd expect a lot of activity.

- So a short window of time, but still.

- Yes, exactly.

There were also no documentation of communication by anyone at RIDOT about the bridge over that crucial weekend, between the Friday identification of the problem and the Monday closure of the bridge.

So, as people can tell from this conversation, there are just so many questions that remain about the bridge situation, which is why I think you're gonna see a lot more reporting on it in the coming weeks and months.

- Thank you so much, Ted.

I appreciate it.

- Thanks, Michelle.

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