Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Bridge case culprit: Christie, aides used Port Authority as ‘goody bag’

The admitted mastermind of the mysterious George Washington Bridge lane closings broke a three-year silence on Friday, testifying in federal court here that everything he did in his job was at the direction and for the benefit of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

David Wildstein — who has confessed to coming up with the scheme to close the lanes and is cooperating with federal prosecutors in the trial of two top Christie administration officials accused of conspiring with him — described the governor and his aides as scheming for creative ways to use government resources to help Christie’s re-election and, ultimately, his ambitions to run for president.

Christie and his aides were looking for favors to hand out to officials they hoped would support the governor, he said. And they saw the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the $8 billion-a-year, two-state agency that runs the bridge along with other major transportation hubs and systems in the region — as a particularly sweet “goody bag,” as an email revealed in court described it.

The Christie administration used the agency to spread money and jobs, as well as emotionally rich gifts like pieces of mangled steel and ceremonial flags from the World Trade Center and private tours of the construction site there, Wildstein said.

Wildstein, who had been hired at the Port Authority by one of the defendants, Bill Baroni, Christie’s top staff appointee at the agency, recalled a conversation he and Baroni had soon after they started their jobs in 2010, establishing what they called the “one constituent” rule.

“The only person that had to be happy was Gov. Christie,” Wildstein explained, adding, “We used that as the barometer by which a decision would be made at the Port Authority.”

“How did you know what the one constituent wanted?” a prosecutor, Lee Cortes, asked him.

“Because we were told by Gov. Christie or a member of the governor’s staff,” Wildstein replied.

Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Christie, are charged with closing access lanes to the bridge for four days in 2013 to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, the town on the New Jersey side of the bridge that was gridlocked by the closings, because he declined to endorse the governor for re-election.

Wildstein, who arrived at the Port Authority with no transportation experience — he had written an anonymous political blog for the previous 10 years while working at his family’s textile company — has pleaded guilty to conceiving the plan. Baroni approved it, prosecutors say, and Kelly directed it.

As early as five months into Christie’s first term in 2010, Wildstein testified Friday, some of Christie’s closest aides were already discussing a plan to secure endorsements from Democratic mayors to help Christie, a Republican, win a crushing and broad victory for his re-election three years later. With that sweeping win, the governor’s aides believed, Christie could present himself as the Republican best able to win the White House in 2016.

Christie and Bill Stepien, who would go on to run the governor’s re-election campaign in 2013, said the Port Authority would be a key part of this strategy, Wildstein testified. The agency would hand out favors, but the governor’s office would make the phone call or hold the photo op to announce the gifts, so Christie could take credit.

“The Port Authority had the ability to do things for Democratic officials that would potentially put the governor in a more favorable position,” Wildstein said.

By 2011, Stepien and Kelly, who worked for and later replaced Wildstein in the department in the administration that was in charge of soliciting endorsements, had begun identifying particular mayors whose support they wanted. They had started to hand out gifts — surplus Port Authority vehicles to the mayor of Washington Township, a local grant to Springfield and, to Fort Lee, shuttle buses and firefighting equipment.

In an email exchange that spring about possible World Trade Center tours for officials described by Kelly as “significant mayors,” Wildstein promised that when he saw her a few days later he would be “prepared to talk about other things in the Port Authority goody bag.”

It was a reference, he said in court on Friday, to “all the things the Port Authority had available to the governor’s office that could be helpful to Gov. Christie,” including jobs and patronage positions that could be used to woo Democrats.

“I like goody bags!” Kelly wrote back. “I appreciate it.”

But on at least a couple of occasions, Wildstein seemed to be directing Baroni and Kelly. When the Port Authority approved sending surplus vehicles to Washington Township, Wildstein told Kelly to call the town’s police chief and mayor.

“Very welcome news,” Kelly reported back. “The chief couldn’t believe he was on the gov’s radar.”

The prosecution’s case hinges on Wildstein’s account; and the defense’s, on undermining him as a kind of evil genius and a rogue operator.

Wildstein, himself, smiled slightly as he recounted his own unusual route to power. He had his first phone call with Christie when they were both teenagers in the town of Livingston, New Jersey, volunteering on a political campaign. (Wildstein said he has been in politics in New Jersey for 43 years, or since he was 12.)

He started the blog in 2000 to pursue a different kind of journalism, “insider politics,” he said, describing his tone in writing about state officials and debates as “kind of harsh, very blunt.”

In that decade, few people knew of his dual identity — but among them were Baroni, Stepien and Mike DuHaime, the governor’s political strategist. And when the governor came to power, Wildstein did not think he could write harshly or objectively about them.

Baroni sat up rigidly at the defense table as Wildstein described him as the closest friend he had ever had, and how Baroni had hired him to be a “bad cop” at the Port Authority, where the governor was looking to reassert New Jersey’s power in an often toxic relationship with New York state.

The two men no longer speak to each other.

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