{"id":14454,"date":"2016-11-07T04:58:50","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T04:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=14454"},"modified":"2016-11-07T04:58:50","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T04:58:50","slug":"bridgegate-brought-dark-inner-workings-of-christie-team-to-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/bridgegate-brought-dark-inner-workings-of-christie-team-to-light.html","title":{"rendered":"Bridgegate brought dark inner workings of Christie team to light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bridgegate brought dark inner workings of Christie team to light<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Bridgegate brought dark inner workings of Christie team to light:-<\/strong> For almost seven years, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie\u2019s brain trust and support staff toiled in anonymity, staying busy and keeping quiet while their celebrity leader did all the talking.<\/span><\/p>\n

But over the past seven weeks, many of them spoke nervously and plainly in a federal courtroom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their tense, sometimes dramatic trial testimony turned the once prized public servants of Team Christie into collateral damage from the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, the former top Christie aides convicted Friday, none of these staffers were charged in the scheme.<\/span><\/p>\n

In most cases, these officials \u2014 ranging from entry-level operatives to senior advisers \u2014 provided threads of testimony that helped prosecutors weave together their case or allowed defense attorneys to lay out a narrative for innocence.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the staffers also left the courtroom with their images and credibility called into doubt, a heavy price to pay working the long, pressure-filled hours in \u201c<\/span>Christieworld,\u201d as Kelly called it.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only staffers who left the courtroom tarnished. Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, the target of the scheme, conceded that he lied when he wrote a letter to a newspaper categorically dismissing any suggestion that the lane closings were punitive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Patrick Foye, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey executive director, and white-knight whistleblower of the scheme, conceded that he signed off on a misleading press release about the episode. And top Port Authority police union officials, who testified that they resisted pressure to play a role in a phony cover-up story about the closings, were attacked by Baroni\u2019s attorney as liars.<\/span><\/p>\n

The accounts of so many public officials caught in the undertow of a scheme fueled in large part by Christie\u2019s own presidential ambitions point to another casualty of the trial: public service.<\/span><\/p>\n

The warts-and-all tour of the inside of the secretive Christie administration comes at a time of near <\/span>toxic-levels of voter distrust in government. A Pew Research Center study last year said that the number of Americans who have a deep, abiding trust in government was only 19% \u2014 the lowest level in nearly 50 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

The survey also said an alarming number of people had lost faith in elected officials \u2014 nearly 55% said \u201cordinary Americans\u201d would do a better job of solving national problems, a sentiment that helped fuel the improbable rise of Donald Trump, the anti-establishment Republican nominee who vows to \u201cdrain the swamp of Washington, D.C.,\u201d corruption.<\/span><\/p>\n

Christie, now a top Trump adviser, also ran against Washington and tried to harness public disgust in his short-lived presidential campaign. Christie cast himself as the outsider, but one with experience and proven skill to govern the country out gridlock.<\/span><\/p>\n

The irony of the trial that targeted Christie\u2019s administration will, as Paul Fishman, the United States attorney for New Jersey, described it Friday, feed the \u201ccynical notion that people in government can\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t be trusted.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The trial detailed an administration obsessed with promoting the interests of \u201cone constituent.\u201d Christie\u2019s ambition came first. And the trial described in unflattering detail the great lengths Christie officials went to boost his political prospects.<\/span><\/p>\n

It detailed how a constituent-service office was turned into an arm of the governor\u2019s re-election campaign, targeting Democratic mayors with a \u201cgoody bag\u201d of resources from the Port Authority in hopes of winning their endorsements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Helping steer the permanent campaign was David Wildstein, a longtime Republican <\/span>operative and political prankster, serving as Christie\u2019s $150,000-a-year henchman at the Port Authority. Wildstein was described as angling to find a spot on the Christie presidential campaign. Wildstein testified that it was his idea to dole out U.S. flags that flew over the World Trade Center as a way to curry favor with Republican officials around the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wildstein, who was the government\u2019s star witness in the case, also admitted that it was his idea to close two traffic lanes to the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee as a way to punish the mayor, Mark Sokolich, who refused to endorse Christie\u2019s re-election in 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was this scheme that would drag Christie officials out of anonymity and into the courtroom for a brief, but bruising star turn on the witness stand.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was Evan Ridley, a twentysomething staffer in the Intergovernmental Affairs Office who simply relayed the frantic complaints from Sokolich about the paralyzing gridlock caused by the inexplicable closing of two approach lanes to the nearby bridge.<\/span><\/p>\n

But as the trial wore on, Ridley\u2019s young r\u00e9sum\u00e9 took a beating. He was depicted as a ne\u2019er-do-well, who had lost the confidence of his supervisors.<\/span><\/p>\n

And when it was Ridley\u2019s time to take the stand to testify, he admitted under oath that he played hooky from work on Aug. 16, 2013, choosing to \u201chang out\u201d with a friend in Manhattan when supposed to have been cultivating Democratic mayors for possible endorsements for Christie\u2019s re-election.<\/span><\/p>\n

The credibility of Ridley\u2019s immediate supervisor, Christine Genovese Renna, had come into question.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the trial Renna was forced to recast an explosive text message that she sent to another Christie staffer, accusing Christie of \u201cflat out\u201d lying on Dec. 13, 2013, as he assured reporters that no one on his senior staff, including his campaign chief of staff Bill Stepien, had been involved in the scheme. Those texts, released before the trial, also contradicted her own testimony a year earlier to the Legislature\u2019s investigative panel.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a poor choice of words,\u201d she <\/span>testified, but stressed that she had \u201cno knowledge\u201d whether Christie was lying. Other testimony and evidence described Renna as angry, \u201cgrudge holder\u201d when Kelly, her boss at the time, passed her over for a promotion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Drewniak, Christie\u2019s once sharp-tongued press secretary, acknowledged that he instilled a \u201cproper level of fear\u201d into a Port Authority spokesman, who was deemed to be insufficiently loyal to Christie.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the trial\u2019s opening arguments, defense attorney Michael Critchley recounted an email in which Drewniak detailed his desire to beat a Star-Ledger columnist with a lead pipe. Drewniak, now the chief of staff at NJ Transit, was also depicted in testimony as one of the first senior officials scrambling to gather information about the lane closings, and informed Christie on Dec. 5, 2013, that Wildstein had told him the night before over dinner that Kelly and Stepien had early knowledge of the purported \u201ctraffic study\u201d at the George Washington Bridge.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the testimony could continue to shadow some officials in the coming months. Deborah Gramiccioni, a trusted ex-federal prosecutor Christie named as Baroni\u2019s replacement at the Port Authority, testified how she warned Christie on Dec. 12, 2013, of a \u201chum\u201d in the administration about possible emails showing that Kelly was looped in on the lane closing scheme.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe appeared visibly concerned to hear that,\u201d said Gramiccioni, who Christie recently nominated to become a Superior Court judge. But despite that warning, Christie went public the next day, absolving his staff of any involvement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she plans to question Gramiccioni during her confirmation hearing about that testimony. She also intends to ask Gramiccioni how her testimony about Dec. 12 squares with Christie\u2019s statement from last Friday, in which he said, \u201cno believable evidence was presented\u201d in the trial that contradicted his long-held claim that he had no prior knowledge about the lane closings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/nation-now\/2016\/11\/06\/bridgegate-christie-team\/93403850\/<\/span><\/p>\n

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