While several backed the Republican governor for reelection, the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, refused to provide his support.

As asserted by prosecutors in the legal cases that followed, Christie's deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly contacted through email Bill Baroni, the Deputy Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and David Wildstein, the director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority, to suggest they create traffic problems for Fort Lee in retaliation for Sokolich's refusal and coerce his support.

Fishman's investigation led to the indictments issued against Kelly and Baroni in May 2015 on charges of conspiracy and fraud; Wildstein, who had been convicted earlier, had agreed to testify against the two as part of a plea bargain.

Legal analysts believed that this signaled a likelihood the Court would overturn the conviction as it had followed a number of similar cases of reversals or overturning of convictions of high-level state and federal officials on federal fraud charges due to the lack of evidence to demonstrate corruption or fraud.

Court observers found that there was no discernible pattern to how the Justices questioned both sides of the case, making it difficult to determine how they would ultimately decide.