All Eyes Are on Chris Christie as Trial in Bridge Scandal Starts
By KATE ZERNIKE SEPT. 6, 2016
nytimes.com
It might be easy to forget, now that he has endorsed and defended Donald J. Trump to the ridicule and anger of fellow Republicans he called friends, that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was himself once a leading, if not the leading, presidential hopeful in his party. Then came revelations of a scheme so preposterous that it was hard to believe: Aides to the governor had deliberately created a traffic jam at the world’s busiest bridge as political payback.
The trial in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal, which is scheduled to open on Thursday with jury selection, will play out like a documentary on the rise and fall of Mr. Christie’s presidential ambitions, a tell-all tale of how he and his aides built his administration and his 2013 re-election campaign with an eye to winning the White House, then scrambled to contain the damage as inquiries into the lane closings began to wreck those hopes.
The governor is expected to be on a list of people who federal prosecutors say knew about the scheme to create gridlock in order to punish a mayor who had declined to endorse him.
And while prosecutors have fought back against a defense lawyer’s assertion that the case is “criminalizing normal politics,” their argument in court filings is that the lane closings were precisely that: normal politics. At least, normal Christie politics — aggressively transactional and focused above all on winning.
In the prosecutors’ portrayal — and defense lawyers do not really disagree — the Christie administration treated the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the $8 billion-a-year bistate agency that operates the bridge, as an arm of the governor’s campaign for a second term, using it to cajole mayors into endorsing Mr. Christie and discipline them if they did not. An entire department of the governor’s office was focused on gaining the support of local officials, as Mr. Christie sought the sort of landslide victory that would allow him to argue that he was the Republican best able to take the White House.
“It offers a glimpse at the kind of machinations that went into shaping a candidate with national ambitions,” said Brigid Callahan Harrison, a professor of political science and law at Montclair State University. “Not just all of the kind of back-room inside politics that many people find really distasteful, but the enormous extent to which the administration would flex its muscles to paint Chris Christie as this candidate that had such broad appeal.”
Nearly three years after the mystery of the lane closings captivated New Jersey, the trial will finally answer big questions. Perhaps biggest of all: When and how did Mr. Christie know about the plan, as the prosecution’s star witness has said he did? And who else was involved?
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