It’s getting hot in New Jersey
by digby
In the Governor’s office anyway. From TPM:
According to a report published last night in the Bergen (NJ) Record, federal investigators working for the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in January subpoenaed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for records relating to the personal travel of its former chairman, David Samson. Included in the report, written by the indefatigable Shawn Boburg, were details surrounding a now-cancelled nonstop flight route that United Airlines briefly ran between Newark Liberty Airport and Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina, less than an hour from Aiken, South Carolina, where Samson has owned a home since 2006. United ran that flight for nineteen months before canceling the route on April 1, 2014, three days after Samson resigned from his position as the head of the bi-state agency with an annual budget of just under $8 billion. According to an insider, Samson referred to the briefly-lived and lightly-used Newark-Columbia route as “the chairman’s flight.”
For months there have been signs that U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman’s investigation of September 2013 toll lane closures on the George Washington Bridge has ventured deep into the offices and activities of officials at the agency, and well beyond interrogating the now-debunked claim that the closures were part of a “traffic study.” Former Port Authority deputy director Bill Baroni, agency director David Wildstein, Gov. Chris Christie’s former deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly, and former Christie re-election chief Bill Stepien are all thought to remain at risk of being indicted if and when Fishman unveils charges. So are several members of government relations staffs at both the agency and in the N.J. governor’s office, as well as one staff member in the agency’s counsel’s office whose legal representatives have figured prominently in bills obtained through FOIA requests to the Port Authority. I recently reported that Ray Pocino, the vice president of the N.J. Laborers and a Port Authority commissioner, was interviewed last fall by federal prosecutors not long before Governor Christie himself was questioned by Fishman’s investigators at the governor’s mansion in Princeton, N.J.
But until now it has been unclear whether Governor Christie is a target of Fishman’s investigation, largely because it has been unclear how deeply David Samson would be implicated in any wrongdoing at the Port Authority.
Read on. This is one of those byzantine state scandals that never seem to truly end. The problem for Christie is that there are enough “mainstream” candidates running for president that there’s really no reason for the Big Money Boyz to take a risk on him. (Not that all the “mainstream” candidates aren’t dirty as hell themselves. Christie, however, is the only one that has a US Attorney investigating him at them moment.)
I didn’t think this story would have legs because I thought most Republicans’ eyes would glaze over at a “traffic” scandal. Big city problems, who cares? But once you get a federal prosecutor on your trail anything can happen.
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