NEWARK: New Jersey legislators on Friday planned to release nearly 1,000 pages of documents that may shed new light on a probe of four days of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge apparently orchestrated by Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s top aides to settle a political score.

The release would come the day after Christie, a star of his party seen as a likely 2016 White House contender, fired the staffer who had sent e-mails calling for trouble at the key commuter choke point and repeatedly apologized in a two-hour news conference.

The scandal, which had been brewing for weeks, burst onto the national stage on Wednesday when New Jersey officials released e-mails that appeared to show Christie’s staff plotting the lane closures in September to retaliate against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, because he had not endorsed the governor’s re-election campaign.

Christie had counted on the decisive victory he won in November to show a degree of bipartisan appeal and boost his chances of winning his party’s nomination for president, political experts say.

During Thursday’s news conference, where Christie repeatedly apologized for his staff’s actions but also denied knowing of the move, he said he was not yet thinking about a possible 2016 bid.

Christie has no public appearances scheduled for Friday.

After his emphatic statements on Thursday that he had told voters all he knew about the incident, any further implications in Friday’s document release that the governor or his staff knew more about the incident than they acknowledged could cause the scandal to continue to dog Christie, observers said.

“He’s not fully in control of this story anymore,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University. “Because he took such a firm stand yesterday and was emphatic that this was it, any information that shows otherwise will continue the story and force him to put more time on it.”