Ex-Christie aide’s lawyer paints government witness as liar
David Wildstein was drawn closer to Gov. Chris Christie’s inner circle Friday by a defense attorney who got the confessed architect of the George Washington Bridge lane closures to admit that he engaged in “lies and deception” long before he allegedly conspired with two allies of the governor to create gridlock in Fort Lee to punish its Democratic mayor.
Wildstein, 55, a former Port Authority executive who has pleaded guilty in the scheme, detailed his intimate involvement with Christie’s re-election campaign and his eagerness to help the governor in his subsequent bid to win the White House.
He said he even joked with Christie about serving as his ambassador to a small Caribbean territory as a reward if Christie were elected president.
And in one revelation striking to the depth of the relationship between the two former classmates from Livingston, Wildstein confirmed that Christie disclosed grand jury information in a State House meeting about police leadership at the Port Authority.
Wildstein’s testimony bounced from the governor’s “off again, on again” relationship with Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, to advising his campaign manager and chief strategist on securing endorsements, voting patterns and raising money from Wall Street. It was all designed to portray Wildstein as a far more significant political operative in Christie’s orbit than he has let on in the last week under questioning by prosecutors.
The defense spent much of the week working to strip Wildstein of credibility in pursuit of clearing the names of Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, and Bill Baroni, once Wildstein’s boss and the highest-ranking New Jersey official at the Port Authority. The pair have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and civil rights violations and deny plotting and executing the traffic scheme with Wildstein.
Defense attorneys contend that Wildstein will do and say anything to serve his own interests. On Friday morning, Baroni’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, argued to the judge that Wildstein perjured himself during cross-examination the previous two days for conflicting accounts of key details in the trial.
Kelly’s attorney, Michael Critchley, then quickly went to work portraying Wildstein as a deceitful opportunist by using his own words against him and bluntly describing his admitted tactics as an operative. He raised the time in 1982 when Wildstein stole the suit jacket of Democrat Frank Lautenberg before a U.S. Senate campaign debate, the time he threw out a rival’s petitions for the Livington Republican committee chairmanship and the many times he told friends a fabricated story about renting a bus and driving Democrats and African-Americans to Atlantic City one Election Day to help a Republican state senator win re-election.
Critchley was incredulous that Wildstein could not remember the context of an email he sent to Kelly the day before she sent him the infamous email: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
Wildstein had written on Aug. 12, 2013, “I have an issue to discuss with you that’s extremely weird even by my standards.”
Critchely noted that on Thursday Wildstein testified he remembers his first conversation with Christie 39 years ago, but now he had no recollection of this email to Kelly.
“Isn’t that a fib … a convenient lapse of memory,” Critchley said. “Do you have a selective memory?”
“No sir, I do not,” Wildstein replied.
Critchley also pressed Wildstein about a Sept. 14, 2013 email Kelly sent him the day after the Fort Lee lanes were reopened by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top executive appointee at the Port Authority.
Kelly had written, “Check out the Road Warrior. I’m confused.” The reference was to The Record columnist who broke the story of the traffic that paralyzed Fort Lee after two of the three local access lanes to the bridge were closed for four mornings, and suspicions it was done to punish the mayor.
Wildstein said he didn’t know what Kelly meant when she said she was confused.
Wildstein told Critchley that it is “fair to say” he lied and deceived people over the course of his four-decade career in politics, including lying on his job application to the Port Authority by certifying that he held a Bachelor’s Degree in political science. He does not.
Critchley homed in on Wildstein’s time at the Port Authority to illustrate the close connection with Christie, beginning with a June 2010 meeting in Trenton, a month after he was hired. There, alongside Christie’s chief of staff and appointments counsel, Wildstein was told details of a grand jury investigation, he said.
Wildstein acknowledged that Christie told him “someone had lied” when he was U.S. Attorney but that his office didn’t believe there was enough evidence to indict the person, who was not named in testimony. Wildstein said “yes” when Critchley asked him if Christie wanted him to “fire this individual” and hire Jerry Speziale, then the Passaic County Sheriff running for re-election as a Democrat, to head the Port Authority police.
At the time of the meeting, Speziale, now the police director in Paterson, had nearly $1 million in his campaign war chest.
“Governor Christie said to me that I’m trying to win a sheriff’s race in Passaic County,” and that he wanted Speziale to get the Port Authorty job, Wildstein said.
Speziale was hired for $198,000 a year.
Christie also intervened when a newspaper reported that Wildstein was making a salary of $215,000 a year, he said.
“Governor Christie suggested that that salary be lowered, and I accepted that,” said Wildstein, whose salary was reduced to $150,000.
Christie has said he “could probably count on one hand the number of conversations” he had with Wildstein during his tenure at the Port Authority. But Critchley presented Wildstein with at least 20 dates in his calendar in which he was scheduled to meet with or attend a conference call with Christie or his top staff. And Critchley showed the jury a photo from the groundbreaking ceremony for the new PATH station in Harrison showing Christie with his arm around Wildstein, both smiling.
“I was teased about this particular photo and how adoringly that we were looking at each other,” Wildstein said.
Wildstein and Christie had such an easy rapport that the two shared a laugh at the 2012 wedding of Christie’s chief spokesman at the time, Michael Drewniak.
“I said to Governor Christie that if you get elected president I wanted to lay claim to the ambassador of Anguilla,” Wildstein said, referring to the Caribbean island.
But Wildstein was serious about Christie’s re-election the following year and, in the 2016 election, winning the White House.
In the weeks leading up to and after the lane closures, Wildstein frequently communicated with Christie’s gubernatorial re-election campaign manager, Bill Stepien.
Wildstein and Stepien both had their eyes on the White House even before Christie won re-election in 2013, according to his testimony. In a September 2012 email to Stepien, Wildstein suggested that an eventual Christie presidential campaign could use a tactic the governor has employed to curry favor with elected officials for endorsements: offering American flags that flew over the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.
“Just to be clear, at some point hundreds of flags flown over the WTC will find their way to VFWs all through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina ,” Wildstein wrote, referring to the first three primary voting contest states.
Wildstein is scheduled to take the stand again Tuesday.