“The Chris Christie Scandal Just Got Worse”: Amid New Gale Force Winds, Will Christie Be ‘Stronger Than The Storm’?
When there is still snow on the ground past St. Patrick’s Day, thoughts turn longingly to the beach. Say, the Jersey Shore. Which in turn brings to mind the extreme yet comically ham-handed efforts of Governor Chris Christie’s administration to keep secret the process that led to the controversial selection exactly one year ago of a firm to run a $25 million ad campaign for last summer’s tourist season touting the Shore’s comeback from Superstorm Sandy.
As you may recall, Christie came under criticism during his reelection campaign last summer for having inserted himself and his family into the rousing “Stronger than the Storm” ads encouraging tourists to come back to the Jersey Shore. The ads had been funded by federal Sandy recovery aid, and it seemed eyebrow-raising, at the least, for them to feature beaming pictures of a governor in the middle of a reelection campaign, rather than just your average smiling New Jerseyans. The eyebrows shot up quite a bit further when it emerged that the firm that had gotten the job after proposing to feature Christie in its ads, public relations giant MWW, had bid at a much higher price—$4.7 million versus $2.5 million—than a well-regarded New Jersey ad firm that had proposed ads that did not feature the governor. Making matters even more interesting was that the award had been made by a selection committee led by Christie’s very close longtime aide, Michele Brown, whom Christie appointed to run the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, a $225,000 post. Also noteworthy was that MWW had hired just a few months earlier the former executive director of the influential Burlington County Republican Party. (It was also hard not to notice that MWW’s founder and CEO, Michael Kempner, who is normally a loyal Democratic donor, was not writing any big checks to Barbara Buono, Christie’s opponent, last year.) New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone, a Democrat, in January asked the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to audit the awarding of the job to make sure federal contracting rules were followed.
Further raising the intrigue around the “Stronger than the Storm” ads has been the lengths to which the Christie administration has gone to keep secret the relevant documentation. When Shannon Morris, the president of the New Jersey company, Sigma Group, that came in second to MWW, last summer requested the state’s evaluations of the proposals to better understand why her firm had lost, she received almost nothing in response. “Typically when you have a state-run bid like that you have…it fully transparent, it’s all posted online,” Morris told me. “There was nothing like that in this case.” When Asbury Park Press reporter Bob Jordan made an open-records request for the scoresheets that the selection committee members filled out to rank the ad proposals, the state returned to him in January the scoresheets—with the names of the committee members redacted.
Knowing this, I was heartened to find that my own request for the scoresheets was returned to me later in January with the names of the committee members fully disclosed. I planned to include details from the scoresheets in a cover story on Christie that I was in the process of writing, but the piece’s main thrust veered away from the Sandy ads, and I decided to revisit that issue later. This week, when I went to do just that, I discovered that the Internet link the Economic Development Authority had given me for the reams of documents I had requested was no longer operable. I asked that the documents be resent. They were, and lo, this time the names of the committee members were redacted from the scoresheets. When I asked the authority’s legal officer, Shane McDougall, about the discrepancy, he replied that “if the original documents had been disseminated without these redactions, it was done inadvertently.” He added that the redaction of names was done “on the basis of the advisory, consultative, and deliberative privilege, the expectation of privacy and the protection of the competitive bidding process.”
This retroactive redaction might have been maddening were it not so ineffective: I had seen enough between what had been sent before and what was in the newly redacted documents to piece together the story behind the evaluation process. Put simply, there was no contest whatsoever between MWW on the one hand and Sigma Group and the two other finalists on the other hand. In fact, reading the scoresheets is a bit like looking at the scores of the East Bloc figure skating judges at the Olympics during the height of the Cold War.
The average score the six committee members gave MWW’s proposal, out of 1000 possible points, was 953. The average score for Sigma Group’s proposal was 718.
And as I had taken note of when I had first seen the unredacted scoresheets, the differential was the largest of all in the evaluation by Michele Brown, who has a very long history with Christie: she is a longtime close neighbor of his in Mendham Township, she traveled extensively with him when she worked alongside him in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she received a $46,000 loan from him in 2007 that he failed to report on his income taxes, and she took the lead in screening open-records requests for his tenure as U.S. Attorney while he was campaigning for governor in 2009. In her new role as head of the Economic Development Authority, she was in charge of the selection committee for the Sandy ad. And she, more than anyone else on the committee, made sure to put MWW far ahead of the competition—she gave MWW a score of 970, above even the high average score it received overall, and she gave Sigma Group only 590, by far its lowest score. (A spokesman at the Economic Development Authority did not respond to a request for comment from Brown.)
Matching the other scoresheets to the committee members was not exactly a forensic challenge. One of the sheets had an evaluator’s name accidentally left unredacted—Jackie Kemery, a procurement analyst in the state’s Department of the Treasury, who gave MWW a score of 940 and Sigma a score of 750—and it required only rudimentary handwriting analysis to match with a high degree of confidence the other scoresheets with the handwriting on other, unredacted paperwork filled out by the committee members that had been included in records I received. (The other committee members included Maureen Hassett, senior vice president for finance and development at the Economic Development Authority; Sara Maffey-Duncan, deputy director of the authority’s Office of Recovery; Melissa Orsen, chief of staff in the Department of State within the Lieutenant Governor’s office; and Gabrielle Gallagher, director of legal and regulatory affairs at the Department of Community Affairs, which oversees state aid to towns and cities.)
Which raises the question: why in the world was the Christie administration going to such lengths to obscure such basic facts about the selection process as which committee members awarded which sky-high scores to MWW? Morris, the head of Sigma Group, has a pretty good hunch: that the administration is doing anything it can to cover up the fact that the selection process had been essentially rigged from the get-go, which is the thought that came to her when she got to see the proposal from MWW. MWW and the ad firm it was partnering with, Brushfire, had less experience in this realm than did Sigma and the big national ad firm it partnered with, Weber Shandwick; whereas Weber Shandwick had produced comeback ads for New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, MWW’s application cited Brushfire’s experience making ads for Minwax, Thompson’s Water Seal and DeLonghi cappuccino machines. Given that contrast, Morris thought “we had a slam dunk here” to get the job.
But then she saw MWW’s proposal, and it was far, far beyond what her firm had managed to put together in the four days they’d been given to submit a proposal. Whereas Sigma had basic storyboards for the ads it was proposing, MWW had “fully conceptualized” apps, video games, and other digital components on top of its conventional ad proposal. “It was like looking at a 10-day term paper versus a 150-page book,” she said. “I don’t know how you do that unless someone had a head start.” (MWW did not respond to a request for comment.)
As it happens, Morris did get one communication back from Michele Brown after her repeated attempts to get an explanation for being passed over: Brown sent Morris a form letter congratulating her for being named one of New Jersey’s “Best 50 Women in Business.” The letter urged Morris to reach out to Brown if she ever needed any assistance, so Morris wrote her asking again for an explanation of the contract award.
She never heard back.
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, March 18, 2014
“Chris Christie’s Nightmare Worsens”: Walls Caving In Amid New Revelations And Poll
While reporters pondered the meaning of of former Chris Christie aide Bridget Kelly appearing in court personally to fight subpoenas for her email and documents – Why would Kelly show up at all? Might she eventually talk? Why is she wearing a black cardigan and pearls? — the bad news for Christie continued. A Des Moines Register poll shows that Iowa voters are paying attention to Christie’s bridge scandal woes, with 57 percent disapproving of the way he’s handled it and only 25 percent approving.
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, the damage is even worse. Christie’s approval numbers have flipped in the new Fairleigh Dickinson poll: the man who won reelection in a landslide in November has seen his disapproval ratings spike, and for the first time since his first election, more New Jersey voters disapprove than approve of the job he’s doing as governor. A Rutgers/Eagleton poll also released Tuesday found that trust in Christie has cratered, too: 23 percent of those polled said the word “trustworthy” could be used to describe Christie “very well;” that’s down 20 percent just since October.
In some ways, the Iowa news doesn’t matter much to Christie: it was never going to be a strong Christie state in the 2016 GOP nominating process, since social conservatives dominate its first-in-the-nation caucuses. Christie’s only hope was mobilizing Republican-leaning independents to join the caucuses, a heavy lift in any scenario.
But now even that path seems closed to Christie, as Iowa Independents disapprove of Christie’s bridge-scandal handling 60-20. Among registered Republicans, 47 percent disapprove while 34 percent say he’s doing all right. “If Governor Christie runs, he may choose to follow John McCain and Rudy Giuliani’s path and skip Iowa,” a top Iowa GOP strategist told the Des Moines Register. That worked for McCain, temporarily anyway, but not at all for Giuliani, who was once the towering Christie figure on the GOP horizon – a blue-state Republican tough guy beloved by the media — whose presidential campaign flame-out was a remarkable display of hubris and incompetence.
Still, the most damaging developments for Christie are closer to home. A New York Times investigation published Tuesday shows he’d turned the Port Authority “into a de facto political operation” even before Kelly declared it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Christie used big Port Authority projects to win endorsement from Democrats and union leaders, and in a ghoulish touch, even handed out wreckage from the World Trade Center to reward mayors who backed him. Just last week a WNYC-NJ Spotlight investigation revealed that his administration mishandled $25 million in Hurricane Sandy grants, giving huge awards where there was no storm damage, stiffing places with huge flooding problems while, yes, underpaying the city of Hoboken by about $700,000, as Mayor Dawn Zimmer has alleged.
All of this corruption has been hiding in plain sight, but the bridge scandal suddenly helped people connect the dots.
Christie continues to insist he’s putting the mess behind him. He took his son to watch New York Mets spring training baseball over the weekend, then showed up at another local town hall Tuesday, though he hasn’t taken questions from the media since his two-hour pity party in early January. Christie is still being covered like a top-tier 2016 candidate, which, given his competition, is somewhat defensible, I suppose. So it’s hard to ignore the bad Iowa news for Christie, and yet it’s irrelevant. Christie’s national career is over, and his tenure in Trenton is endangered as well.
Back to Bridget Kelly: She may win this round in court, but only because it’s become clear that she has a reasonable fear of federal prosecution for her role in the bridge lane closures. Until this round, committee counsel Reid Schar had denied that Kelly might be incriminating herself if she shared the documents the committee wants. In court Tuesday, he acknowledged that risk but insisted his subpoena was narrow enough to protect Kelly’s Fifth Amendment rights.
But if state investigators don’t get Kelly’s documents, federal prosecutors are likely to. I read Kelly’s black-cardigan-and-pearls appearance in court today as designed to remind everyone that she sacrificed her personal and professional life for Christie, and her reward to date has been enormous legal bills and lots of time with lawyers. It’s hard for me to imagine Kelly taking the fall for her ex-boss. But either way, voters are holding her ex-boss accountable.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 11, 2014
“More Than Traffic Problems”: Chris Christie Having Trouble Moving On From That Bridge Thing
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s plan for getting past “Bridgegate” was to simply get past it. As soon as the emails showing that his aides and allies purposefully created traffic congestion as part of some sort of retribution plot were reported in the press, Christie fired aide Bridget Kelly and Port Authority executive David Wildstein. After taking a day to compose himself (or get his story straight), he held an epic press conference at which he spoke until he could plausibly argue that he had answered every single question reporters had for him. Since then he’s mainly appeared before (suspiciously) friendly town hall audiences. He seems to think he’s done enough to get past the worst of it. Yesterday, Christie told a reporter, “You folks are the only people at the moment who are asking me about this.”
Unfortunately, Kelly and Wildstein are also still talking. They are communicating with us from the distant past (a few months ago) thanks to Wildstein’s very helpful cooperation with New Jersey state legislators investigating the scandal. Wildstein — who has a reputation for being “capable of anything” — looks to be working to undermine his former ally with a steady stream of documents. The most recent batch include a return of the headline-friendly “traffic problems” line.
Kelly and Wildstein were texting last August about prominent New Jersey Rabbi Mendy Carlebach. Carlebach — not exactly a liberal, as he was a chaplain at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions — had somehow pissed Wildstein off, though it’s unclear how. (Carlebach claims to have no idea what he could’ve done.) And what do Christie’s allies do to people who piss them off? Exactly. Here are the messages, from the Bergen Record (via TPM):
In the texts about the chaplain, Wildstein sent Kelly a picture of Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, later writing: “And he has officially pissed me off.”
“Clearly,” Kelly responded on Aug. 19.
“We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” Kelly wrote.
“Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” wrote Wildstein, an executive at the bi-state agency that controls the region’s airports.
“Perfect,” Kelly wrote.
These texts took place just a few days after the “time for the traffic problems in Fort Lee” email from Kelly to Wildstein, and a few weeks before the Fort Lee “traffic study” lane closures were carried out. This “traffic problems” suggestion looks to be a joke, and it doesn’t appear that any sort of retribution against Carlebach actually happened, but the fact that the intentional creation of traffic problems was already being treated as a joke between Wildstein and Kelly might indicate that the practice happened more often than just the one time in Fort Lee. (Or else it suggests that they were just so excited about their plan for Fort Lee that they couldn’t shut up about it.)
One thing Chris Christie probably does not want is for text messages like this to continue surfacing in the press weeks after the scandal blew up, while he is in the midst of attempting to convince voters and the press that he and his office have moved past the whole thing. But there is still the threat of more to come. Wildstein’s attorney sent the committee new copies of documents he already disclosed, but with fewer portions redacted, revealing the identities of some of the people he was communicating with. Much is still redacted, but Wildstein could always negotiate to release a bit more. The fact that the target of these messages was a Christie ally, not a small-time Democratic politician, makes them all the more damaging, since part of Christie’s survival strategy rests on having his party and his allies close ranks and declare the investigation a partisan witch-hunt. It’s enough to make a guy wish he hadn’t surrounded himself with incompetent sociopaths.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 27, 2014
“Move Over Chris Christie”: Is Yet Another GOP 2016 Contender Flaming Out?
They say that misery loves company, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) may soon have a friend who can sympathize with seeing a 2016 presidential campaign threatened by a tawdry political scandal.
On Wednesday, more than 27,000 emails were released from a now closed investigation into alleged illegal activity by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) 2010 election campaign. Though Walker himself was never charged with anything, the new documents for the first time tie him directly to his staff’s shady campaign dealings, an embarrassing blow that could hinder his re-election bid this year and dampen his appeal as an establishment alternative come 2016.
A quick recap on how we got here.
Back in 2010, when Walker was still the Milwaukee County executive, his staff established a secret wireless network in the county office to coordinate strategy with his political campaign. Because such coordination is illegal in Wisconsin when done on the taxpayers’ dime, a probe into the effort resulted in convictions for six of Walker’s former aides and allies, including his former deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to a felony for her role.
Walker, meanwhile, came through unscathed — until now, that is.
According to the newly released emails, the investigation into the Walker campaign’s misconduct widened one day before the 2012 election, with raids targeting Walker’s campaign office, the Milwaukee County executive office, and the homes of some Walker staffers. As for that secret wireless router, the emails provide the first direct indication that Walker knew about it.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
“Consider yourself now in the ‘inner circle,'” Walker’s administration director, Cynthia Archer, wrote to Walker aide Kelly Rindfleisch just after the two exchanged a test message.
“I use this private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW and Nardelli. You should be sure you check it throughout the day,” she wrote, referring to Walker by his initials and to Walker’s chief of staff, Tom Nardelli. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
Now, the emails do not prove that Walker actually used the secret network while on the county clock. And many of the details in the unsealed emails have been known for some time. Still, the negative headlines they’re generating — and the subsequent investigative reports they’re bound to spawn — are a stain on the resume of someone many believed to be the GOP establishment’s next best hope after Bridgegate tarnished Christie’s once-glorious political career.
Christie’s downfall is an apt parallel.
Though Christie hasn’t been tied directly to the politically motivated traffic scandal, his aides and appointees have. That leaves just two conclusions to draw about Christie himself: Either he’s lying or he surrounded himself with devious incompetents over whom he had little control. Neither interpretation reflects favorably on a chief executive’s character.
So while Christie is innocent (so far) of any personal wrongdoing, his popularity has taken a massive hit.
That’s the same problem now facing Walker. The governor could still be found guilty in the court of public opinion of poor judgment for hiring law-skirting staffers. Indeed, the Democratic National Committee and local Democratic operatives are now lumping the two governors together under one big umbrella of shame.
“This wasn’t the work of a few rogue staffers,” Michael Czin, a DNC spokesman, said in a statement, “this was a coordinated effort that goes right to the top.”
“Just like in New Jersey, top aides used taxpayer resources to push a political agenda,” he added. “And just like Chris Christie, Scott Walker has a lot of questions to answer.”
The emails support that claim, to a certain extent. One correspondence shows that Walker instructed a top aide to coordinate a daily conference call between county and campaign staff. Again, though that doesn’t implicate Walker in any illegal activity, it suggests he might have encouraged it in his underlings.
Walker’s problems don’t end there, either. As the Huffington Post noted, the emails also revealed that Walker once wanted to fire a doctor because she used to be a thong model, a tale that would be perfect fodder for Democrats who want to trot out their effective “War on Women” message. And the emails also contained a racist, homophobic chain message about a fictional nightmare. (Punch line: “I can handle being a black, disabled, one-armed, drug-addicted, Jewish, homosexual… but please, Oh dear God, don’t tell me I’m a Democrat!”)
Meanwhile, Walker’s recall campaign committee — the governor defeated an attempt to remove him from office in 2012, which is what earned him the national spotlight to begin with — is believed to be the subject of a second, ongoing investigation. Depending on what that investigation finds, Walker could be in for yet another round of awful coverage.
The symmetry between Walker and Christie’s tales is remarkable. Both involve a prominent GOP governor with presumed White House ambitions allegedly using his office for underhanded political machinations. And in both cases, the governor claimed innocence and ignorance of his staff’s misdeeds.
That excuse didn’t work for Christie, and there’s no reason to believe it will work any better for Walker.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, February 20, 2014
“A Governor And His Rogue Operation”: We’re Watching A Governor Who’s Slowly Losing Control Of His Own Enterprise
Last weekend, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) office went on the offensive, targeting former ally David Wildstein with a leaked attack memo a day after Wildstein’s attorney said “evidence exists” proving the governor lied about the bridge scandal. The move backfired: the memo highlighted, among other things, Wildstein’s high school record, making the pushback appear ridiculous.
Late on Friday afternoon, as Rachel noted on the show, Christie’s office tried to do damage control on their damage control with another leak.
The memo from Gov. Chris Christie’s office attacking former appointee David Wildstein’s credibility landed with a thud. It was a striking and deeply personal broadside coming from a chief executive of a state, and even his allies called it a mistake.
But one important person hadn’t seen the missive ahead of time: the governor himself.
Christie’s aides did not run the document – which took the extraordinary step of highlighting incidents from Wildstein’s high school days – by the governor before they sent it out, according to two people familiar with the matter. Instead, someone tucked the high school lines into a daily briefing email to the governor’s supporters, and blasted it out earlier than planned.
Whether or not one believes Christie, a notorious micro-manager, was actually out of the loop is a matter of perspective. Given that the attack memo made the governor’s operation look even worse, it stands to reason Christie aides have an incentive to tell Politico the governor wasn’t involved, though we may never know whether or not this is true.
But even giving Christie and his office the benefit of the doubt, this latest effort raises questions anew about what kind of operation, exactly, the governor is running in New Jersey.
Over the last month or so, the governor’s office has come up with a version of events it desperately hopes the public will believe. It goes like this:
Leading members of Team Christie went rogue last fall, using their power to cripple a community on purpose. As the scandal intensified, other leading members of Team Christie went rogue again last week, launching a misguided attack on a perceived foe. The governor who tends to oversee even the smallest details of his operation, we’re told, was blissfully unaware of what was going on around him in both instances.
This isn’t what the governor’s critics are saying; this is what Team Christie is saying. It’s their defense.
The governor hoped to cultivate an image of an effective manager who knows how to take control and lead, but by all appearances, we’re watching a governor who’s slowly losing control of his own enterprise.
By: Steve Benen, The Maoodw Blog, February 10, 2014
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