Ex-Christie Aide Details Role In Endorsements

Ex-Christie Aide Details Role In Endorsements

By Michael Linhorst and Melissa Hayes, The Record (Hackensack, NJ)

TRENTON, NJ — A onetime key aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie testified Tuesday about the inner workings of a now-defunct state office that lawmakers probing the George Washington Bridge lane closures say blurred the lines between government business and campaign politics.

Matt Mowers spent more than five hours fielding questions about the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which was responsible for working with local officials, and the efforts of Christie’s re-election campaign to secure endorsements from local Democrats — a key part of the re-election strategy for the Republican governor. That office, known as IGA, has been disbanded.

Mowers, who now is the executive director the New Hampshire GOP, is among a group of people who worked to secure endorsements from the same local officials they worked with in their state capacities. Mowers said, however, that he never sought endorsements in his role as a regional director of intergovernmental affairs. That work happened after hours, he said. Mowers, while employed by the state, spoke twice to Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, the alleged target of the lane closures, about endorsing Christie.

In his opening statement before the Select Committee on Investigation, Mowers said that Sokolich, a Democrat, made clear to him last spring that the mayor would not endorse the governor.

“At that point, I did not view an endorsement as a possibility,” Mowers said. “Upon passing this information to others, no one I spoke with seemed overly interested or concerned.”

During the hearing, Democrats focused on emails Mowers sent summarizing his meetings with local officials in his capacity as a state employee. The messages also included political information, like whether or not the mayor would consider endorsing the governor. And lawmakers asked about his contact with IGA staff after he left to work full time for the campaign. Mowers testified that he would still speak to staff, many of whom volunteered for the campaign and that they would exchange information about local officials.

He said that when Bridget Anne Kelly, at the time the deputy chief of staff in charge of intergovernmental affairs, called him on Aug. 12 to ask if Sokolich was endorsing the governor, he didn’t think anything of it. That was one day before she sent the now infamous email, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” to David Wildstein, Christie’s aide at the Port Authority who has been blamed for carrying out the lane closures and has since resigned.

That testimony echoed statements from a widely criticized report that Christie himself commissioned, which concluded the governor did not know of the lane closure scheme. The report did recommend closing the IGA office, which Christie did.

Democrats also questioned how mayors were placed on a “Top 100” list that intergovernmental affairs used for outreach. Mowers said he did not know who created the list, who gave it to him or who directed him to use it.

State Sen. Loretta Weinberg, co-head of the investigative committee, said after the hearing that she worries that Mowers, 24, was an example of a generation of political operatives who have learned from Christie that mixing governing and politics is acceptable.

“This governor’s office taught young people that this is the way government and politics operate, and it’s not and it shouldn’t be,” Weinberg (D-Teaneck) said. “These lines were blurred — there’s no doubt about it.”

While posing questions during the hearing, Sen. Kevin O’Toole (R-Cedar Grove) tried to dismiss the idea that anything inappropriate occurred.

“To suggest that we — all of us — don’t talk about politics while we’re working under the (State House) dome, it’s kind of foolish to say that,” he said. “We don’t live in grain silos isolated from the rest of the world. We live in a political environment.”

But Assemblyman John Wisniewski, co-head of the committee, said getting to the bottom of how someone in the governor’s office was able to direct actions at the Port Authority is the heart of the issue.

“The focus of the investigation is how the abuse of power could happen, how the coverup could happen and how do we stop it from happening,” he said.

“Part of that is understanding this very fuzzy organizational chart in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs from which the lane closure emanated.”

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Photo:  Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr

Democratic Leaders Of Investigative Panel Mull Next Move In Bridge Probe

Democratic Leaders Of Investigative Panel Mull Next Move In Bridge Probe

By Michael Linhorst and Melissa Hayes, The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)

HACKENSACK, N.J.—Democrats leading the panel investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closures met with their lawyer Thursday to decide their next move, one day after a judge ruled that they could not compel two central players in the controversy to hand over documents.

Also weighing on their decision is concern over whether Democratic leaders will continue backing them as their investigation stretches into its fourth month. Stephen Sweeney, the Democratic Senate president, suggested this week — before the judge’s decision — that the committee should stop its investigation if the court ruled against it. Sweeney later tempered his statement, saying he supports the panel’s work.

Through a spokesman, Sweeney declined to comment Thursday about what direction he thinks the panel should take. The speaker of the Assembly, Democrat Vincent Prieto, did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans on the committee were not involved in talks with the panel’s lawyer, Reid Schar, a former federal prosecutor from Illinois. And they also don’t have a preferred way forward.

But lawmakers are still holding out hope for some progress in their investigation: Friday is the deadline they imposed for documents from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm that conducted an internal probe for the governor’s office. Legislators want whatever records the law firm has from the 70 interviews it completed as part of the investigation the Christie administration hired it to make into the lane closures.

Randy Mastro, the Gibson Dunn attorney who led the internal investigation, said in a statement this week that his firm is talking with the committee’s lawyer. On Thursday, however, a spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie declined to comment about what the law firm would do.

Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson’s decision, which was released Wednesday, allows Bridget Anne Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, and Bill Stepien, Christie’s former campaign manager, to refuse to comply with the committee’s demands for documents.

After losing in court, there’s no obvious next step for the committee to take.

But the panel does have several options, according to state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat,, and Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat, co-leaders of the committee.

The lawmakers could appeal the ruling. They could issue new subpoenas to Kelly and Stepien and try to craft those demands in a narrower way that might comply with Jacobson’s ruling. They could offer Kelly and Stepien immunity from prosecution — a power that, Wisniewski says, the committee maintains. They also could shift the focus of their investigation to look more broadly at the politicized inner workings of the governor’s office and the Port Authority.

“There are a variety of alternatives here which we have to consider very carefully in terms of the parallel U.S. attorney’s investigation, in terms of what’s the best legal avenue for us to get the answers that we need,” Weinberg said Thursday.

They also could pause and wait for Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, to complete his investigation into the lane closures. A federal grand jury has issued several subpoenas, and it has heard testimony from at least one person: Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak.

But the wait-and-see approach appears to be out of the question for the Democrats.

“The decision was important, yes,” Wisniewski said of Jacobson’s ruling. “Not what we wanted, of course, but the work of the committee is continuing.”

While they’re deciding on which direction to take, they’re planning to ask additional witnesses to speak before the committee.

“We have been discussing and are in the final stages of extending invitations for individuals to come before the committee and testify in this matter,” said Wisniewski, who did not identify the people he plans to invite.

Complicating the committee leaders’ decision is the possibility of reduced support from Sweeney. The Senate president told The Star-Ledger’s editorial board Monday that if the judge ruled against the committee, it should stop its investigation and let the federal inquiry go forward. He later backed away from that statement, saying he supported the committee’s work.

Like the Democrats, Republicans on the committee haven’t decided on the next step they’d like to take.

“I’m still plowing through the opinion and want to hear from the other 11 members, and I’m waiting to hear from our counsel,” said GOP state Sen. Kevin O’Toole. Although the Republicans hadn’t spoken to Schar, the panel’s attorney, on Thursday, Weinberg and Wisniewski had at least one conversation with him about the court ruling.

If Gibson Dunn doesn’t turn over the documents the committee is seeking by Friday, the committee will subpoena them, Wisniewski said.

The committee is seeking whatever records Gibson Dunn has from interviews, including those with Christie, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and all members of the governor’s Cabinet. Wisniewski said he has “been advised” that the firm did not record or transcribe its interviews from the internal probe. Instead, it likely has memos written by the firm’s lawyers describing the interviews.

Committee member Amy Handlin, a Republican assemblywoman, said that whatever happens next, the panel needs to turn its focus toward implementing legislation that would change the Port Authority.

“I think we should shift priorities for the time being,” she said. “Right now we should push reforms to the top of the list.”

Handlin and other Republicans introduced a set of bills in February that they say would improve the Port Authority’s transparency and operations. But the proposals haven’t advanced in the months since.

Photo:  Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr