Fort Lee lane closure scandal
It involved a staff member and political appointees of then-governor Chris Christie colluding to create traffic jams in Fort Lee, New Jersey by closing lanes at the main toll plaza[3][4] for the upper level of the George Washington Bridge.
[7] It has been suggested that the lanes had been closed to cause the massive traffic problem for political reasons, and especially theorized that they were a retributive attack against Mayor of Fort Lee Mark Sokolich, a Democrat who had not supported Christie as a candidate in the 2013 New Jersey gubernatorial election.
The ensuing investigations centered on several of Christie's appointees and staff, including[8][9] David Wildstein, who ordered the lanes closed,[10] and Bill Baroni, who had told the New Jersey Assembly Transportation Committee that the closures were for a traffic study.
[3] During rush hours, for at least the previous 30 years,[40]: 86 the three lanes located furthest to the right (the south end of the toll plaza) were ordinarily reserved for local traffic entering from Fort Lee and the surrounding communities.
[48] On August 13, Bridget Anne Kelly, deputy chief of staff in Christie's office, sent an eight-word e-mail to David Wildstein that read, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.
[4][53] According to the Fort Lee emergency medical services coordinator, traffic jams delayed paramedic response times, including a 9-1-1 call for Florence Genova, who subsequently died of cardiac arrest.
Fort Lee Borough Administrator Peggy Thomas e-mailed the PA's director of government and community relations, Tina Lado, with her concerns, noting that police and emergency departments received no advance notice of the closures.
[59] At the federal trial of Baroni and Kelly, Fort Lee Police Chief Keith Bendul testified that he had reached Durando on that Monday, who asked for a meeting not at the PA office, but in a nearby municipal parking lot.
[76] On Friday morning, September 13, 2013, Patrick Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority and an appointee of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, ordered that the lanes be reopened in a strongly worded 7:44 a.m. e-mail to senior PA officials and staff, including Bill Baroni and David Samson.
[15][102] The May 2015 indictments of Wildstein, Baroni and Kelly contend that the lane closures were political retribution against Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, for not supporting Christie in the 2013 New Jersey gubernatorial election.
"[111] In a September 12, 2013 e-mail to Bill Baroni, during the time when the closure was still on-going, Mayor Sokolich raised concerns about the redevelopment project, asking "What do I do when our billion-dollar development is put on line at the end of next year?
[44][128] On January 8, 2014, The Star-Ledger, The Record, The New York Times, and other news media published e-mails and text messages tying Bridget Kelly, deputy chief of staff in Christie's office, to the closure.
[142] On January 27, both houses voted unanimously to combine the investigations, maintaining the partisan balance, and announced Senator Kevin O'Toole's (R-Essex) to fill the last spot,[143] despite his mention in a December 5 e-mail from Wildstein to Michael Drewniak.
[170] On April 22, 2014, he announced the joint committee's first subpoenas for oral testimony, initially calling four witnesses to testify: Christina Genovese Renna (former director of intergovernmental affairs), William "Pat" Schuber (a PA commissioner), Patrick Foye, and Michael Drewniak.
According to his letter, Rockefeller, who has long been critical about shortcomings in the PA's operations, was concerned about what seemed to be evidence of "political appointees abusing their power to hamper interstate commerce and safety without public notice".
[219] The trial for Baroni and Kelly, originally scheduled to begin July 7, 2015, was repeatedly rescheduled, first to November 16, 2015, to allow more time for the defense to review the large volume of documents provided by the prosecutors,[220][221] then to May 16, 2016, and then to September 12, 2016.
[222] Prosecutors asked the court that those documents, about 1.5 million pages, be kept from public view in order to protect the privacy of unindicted co-conspirators, but the defense teams opposed that proposal as overly broad, and preventing collaboration with anyone who could assist but would not be a witness.
[225] Media outlets—including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger, and The Record—requested a hearing with Wigenton to ask that the ban be lifted or modified arguing for the First Amendment right of access to criminal court records.
Bill Baroni maintained the argument that the traffic jams were part of a legitimate study to determine "whether congestion on the main approaches to the toll plaza could be reduced if the lanes earmarked for Fort Lee were eliminated".
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that although the move jeopardized the residents of Fort Lee, they concluded the charge of fraud could not be upheld since no property or money was involved, and that "not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime".
[260] In March 2017, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office dropped the complaint against Christie, writing to the Superior Court judge that "we do not believe that an official misconduct charge can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt".
[272] A separate section of the report rejected allegations by Mayor of Hoboken Dawn Zimmer that Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno and Richard Constable, director of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, had linked release of Hurricane Sandy relief funds to approval of a project represented by David Samson's law firm.
[287] On December 16, 2015, a United States District Court Judge issued an opinion criticizing the Gibson firm and its investigation for intentionally failing to preserve notes of interviews conducted by attorneys.
[288] Judge Susan Davis Wigenton, presiding in the criminal trial of Kelly and Baroni, wrote: "The taxpayers of the State of New Jersey paid [Gibson Dunn] millions of dollars to conduct a transparent and thorough investigation.
He named Patrick E. Hobbs, dean of Seton Hall University School of Law, Christie's alma mater, as a part-time ombudsman to address complaints about misconduct, enhance ethics training and accountability, and improve electronic communications in the governor's office.
Sokolich called them "a petty political vendetta",[322] while Barbara Buono contended that a culture of intimidation and retribution engendered by Christie and his staff hampered funding of a challenger even though the state was mostly Democratic.
[76][82] On September 17, 2013, Ted Mann of The Wall Street Journal wrote a story about what could have possibly prompted the Port Authority to close toll lanes to local traffic without public notifications.
[345] The scandal broke in full on January 8, 2014, with an online story by Shawn Boburg of The Record[346][347] that Christie's deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly was involved in the planning of the toll lane closures.
[106] MSNBC gave substantial coverage to the Bridgegate scandal, and the network's ratings reached their highest point since the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings when it covered Chris Christie's apologetic press conference on January 9, 2014.
[351][88] Slavka Drašković of the Serbian government's Office for Cooperation with the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region also condemned their remarks, stating: "We cannot allow for every name that ends in '-ić' to be identified with the bad and abusive, and in this case, to become the victim of prejudice.".
