Federal law enforcement officials have launched a criminal investigation of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and members of his administration, pursuing allegations the governor and his staff broke the law when they quashed grand jury indictments against Christie supporters, International Business Times has learned.
Two criminal investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday interviewed the man who leveled those charges, Bennett Barlyn. He was fired from the Hunterdon County prosecutor’s office in August 2010, and subsequently brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the Christie administration, claiming he had been punished for objecting to the dismissal of the indictments of the governor’s supporters for a range of corrupt activities.
Barlyn told IBTimes that he met with the federal investigators at his Pennsylvania home for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon. He said they specifically focused on why Christie’s then-attorney general, Paula Dow, had moved to expunge the indictments. The investigators are examining what state and federal laws may have been broken in the process. Barlyn said the investigators appeared to be at an exploratory stage, with no certainty that criminal charges would ultimately be filed. The meeting followed a June letter to Barlyn from New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman, instructing Barlyn to be in touch with his office’s investigative team about the case.
This is not particularly surprising.
When Christie was the US Attorney for New Jersey, he routinely leaked grand jury proceedings to target political opponents.
Ethics is not his strong suit.
We knew this when he was booking excessively expensive hotels when he was US attorney, and these days, he is getting the luxury treatment paid for by campaign contributors and state contractors:
As Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waited to depart on a trade mission to Israel in 2012, his entourage was delayed by a late arrival: Mr. Christie’s father, who had accidentally headed to the wrong airport.
A commercial flight might have left without him, but in this case, there was no rush. The private plane, on which Mr. Christie had his own bedroom, had been lent by Sheldon G. Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and supporter of Israel. At the time, he was opposing legislation then before the governor to legalize online gambling in New Jersey.
Mr. Christie loaded the plane with his wife, three of his four children, his mother-in-law, his father and stepmother, four staff members, his former law partner and a state trooper.
King Abdullah of Jordan picked up the tab for a Christie family weekend at the end of the trip. The governor and two staff members who accompanied him came back to New Jersey bubbling that they had celebrated with Bono, the lead singer of U2, at three parties, two at the king’s residence, the other a Champagne reception in the desert. But a small knot of aides fretted: The rooms in luxurious Kempinski hotels had cost about $30,000; what would happen if that became public?
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As United States attorney for New Jersey, Mr. Christie developed a reputation for flouting the rules on travel. A Justice Department report after he left office found that he was the prosecutor who most often exceeded the charges allowed for hotel stays in different cities, without properly searching for a cheaper alternative, or justifying any exemption from the rules. He stayed at a Four Seasons in Washington and a new boutique hotel in Boston, for example, at more than double the cost allowed for those cities.
It’s therefore no surprise that while all of this is going, he is also aggressively ignoring New Jersey open records laws:
On his first day as governor of New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie promised “a new era of accountability and transparency.” But five years later, local reporters and watchdog groups accuse Christie’s administration of making unprecedented efforts to keep public records a secret.
Stonewalled by the Christie administration, media outlets have been forced to sue to obtain even routinely disclosed information, such as payroll data. Rather than release documents connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, pay-to-play allegations, possible ethics violations, and the out-of-state jaunts Christie has made while weighing a run for president, Christie’s office and several state agencies have waged costly court battles. As the 2016 presidential primary race draws closer, and Christie considers jumping in, his administration is fighting 23 different open-records requests in court.
“The track record is abysmal,” says Jennifer Borg, general counsel for the North Jersey Media Group. Her organization, which publishes the Record, has sued the state for public documents a half-dozen times since Christie took office. When a judge determines that the state withheld records illegally—which happens frequently—her group wins legal fees. As of September 2014, Christie’s administration had paid $441,000 to North Jersey Media Group and other media outlets for records. And that doesn’t count the cost of government lawyers’ time.
The fight has become so expensive for the state because when newspapers go to court for these records, they usually win. But winning doesn’t automatically produce the sought-after records. “We can and do beat them in court. But as long as they’re appealing—I don’t want to call it a pyrrhic victory, but we’re not going to get the records,” says Walter Luers, an attorney who helped a transparency project run by the state Libertarian Party sue for public access for Christie’s travel expenses. “Appeals take two to three years. We’re already into the presidential elections. By the time we get these records, Christie could have a new address.”
And then we have his not-corrupt-but-harebrained vaccine statements, which appear to have a pretty long track record, and so it appears to be an actual statement of beliefs, not a gaffe:
New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s administration does not participate in a national program embraced by several of his potential rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination that advises new parents to vaccinate their young children against measles and other diseases.
Governors and senior health officials from 28 states send signed cards to new mothers congratulating them on giving birth and providing them with a detachable checklist of immunisations that their infants should obtain before they are two years old. Christie is not among them, according to the New Jersey department of health.
“One of your most important roles as a parent is to make sure your baby is immunised,” says the message in a recent version of the card. “Keeping your little one healthy means starting immunisations by two months of age.” The advice and checklist are reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The card lists recommended vaccinations, including the combined shot against measles, mumps and rubella that some campaigners continue to link to cases of autism in children, despite this claim’s having being repeatedly and comprehensively debunked by medical researchers.
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New Jersey participated in the program under former Republican governors such as Christie Whitman and Donald DiFrancesco. Yet Donna Leusner, the communications director for Christie’s department of health, said the state had not taken part under the administrations of Christie or his predecessor Jon Corzine, a Democrat.
Jon Corzine, who should be sharing a cell with Chris Christie, though the former should be in jail for fraud in his business practices, and the latter should be in jail for official corruption.
We haven’t even begun the Republican Presidential debates, and it looks like the clown show has already begun.
