Khanna said that Christie was told by Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, two former officials at the Port Authority of NY and New Jersey, which owns and operates the bridge. Bridget Kelly, the governor’s then deputy chief of staff, and Bill Baroni, former deputy head of the Port Authority which controlled the bridge, are charged with instigating lane closures in September 2013 as an act of political spite against Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee that sits in the shadow of the GWB.
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According to attorney Michael Critchley, Kelly’s role in the Christie administration mainly revolved around logistics and scheduling. On the third day of the closures, at a September 11 memorial service at the World Trade Center, Wildstein and defendant Bill Baroni had a “precious few minutes with Gov. Christie”, assistant USA attorney Vikas Khanna told the jury.
But if prosecutors are right, the behavior of Christie’s aides wasn’t a bug but rather a feature – because Christie apparently knew they tried to exert petty revenge on a town, and endangered its residents, simply because the town’s mayor wouldn’t play ball with Christie politically.
Then there is Bill Stepien, Christie’s former campaign manager, who told lawyers hired by the Christie administration that Wildstein had approached him with “some insane idea” for a traffic study. They were indicted on conspiracy charges more than a year ago. Mayor Sokolich, a Democrat, had previously indicated he would not endorse Christie in his gubernatorial re-election bid, a stance that angered Christie’s office that had been trying to present him as a genuinely bipartisan politician. He has claimed that evidence exists showing Christie was aware of the scheme.
A new poll shows Gov. Chris Christie’s approval rating at an all-time low, just as proceedings begin in the Bridgegate trial. “Any statements made in the openings is not a slip of the tongue because lawyers think long and hard on the words they’re going to use and the facts they’re going to emphasize”. Rather, she prepared the governor’s staff for local Christie visits and helped manage his guests in his reserved suite at professional sporting events, he said. A report by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher had found Christie’s claim “rings true”.
“That is in direct contradiction to not only the story that he has told the media, but the story that he told the people of New Jersey back on January 9 of 2014”, Harrison said. Today, at the federal trial of two former public officials accused of conspiring to cause the jam, prosecutors and defense attorneys set out their own narratives of the closure.
Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo.
Maggie Haberman reports that 50 former government officials have written a letter to Trump demanding that he disclose the foreign and domestic business interests he has which could conflict with American foreign policy and national security interests. “It’s an investigation as to why this happened and who authorized it”.
Baroni’s defense will reportedly argue that he is being unfairly singled out, according to CNN. He’s set to be the government’s star witness and to serve as the principal narrator in describing the plot and the cover-up to the jury, said Lee Vartan, a former federal prosecutor not involved in the case. “They were talking to each other”.
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The trial is expected to last at least six weeks.
