Per a report in The New York Times on Monday, a legal team hired directly by Chris Christie’s office performed a review of the George Washington Bridge scandal and found the New Jersey Governor completely innocent of any wrongdoing. The review of the scandal was conducted by Randy M. Mastro, who just so happened to serve as New York City’s deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani has been one of the embattled Christie’s biggest supporters and cheerleaders throughout the fallout of his many controversies these past few months.
Mastro’s law firm was paid $1 million in legal fees to conduct the audit. While they pointed out that they had unlimited access to files and phones records, and that they were able to conduct at least 70 interviews with various people in the Governor’s office and administration, they did not speak with either Bridget Kelly or David Wildstein, the two most central figures in this scandal. Another person who was not interviewed was Christie’s former aide and campaign manager, Bill Stephen.
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The fact that this review was conducted by a man who is a close ally of Rudy Giuliani will lead to much skepticism and criticism. Also, Mastro’s law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, has done work for Christie in the past. This leads one to wonder how impartial this review really was. On top of that, New Jersey taxpayers are the ones forced to foot the bill for the Governor’s internal review.
Considering that Jersey residents are the ones ultimately paying the lawyer bills for this, shouldn’t a truly impartial and unaffiliated law firm or government agency have been tasked with conducting this review? With the use of a close ally as the investigator, Christie has to know that anything coming out of this audit that fully clears him will be seen as nothing but a whitewash. He can’t point to his own office’s investigation and say,’ Look, I’m clean. Time to move on!’
Democratic New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski, who chairs the panel investigating Governor Christie, obviously expressed doubts when the Times story broke on Monday. He told the New Jersey Star-Ledger the following regarding Bridget Kelly’s emails and the fact that she was not interviewed in this review:
“If we don’t know why she sent that email, if we don’t know who gave her the authority to send that email, if we don’t know what she thought she may be accomplishing by sending that email, then we can’t have a complete picture of what happened here.”
The main takeaway here is that nothing at all is resolved. Christie might be able to hold up this report and say it clears him of all wrongdoing or culpability, but only his staunchest supporters will uncritically accept that. Nobody else is going to take, at face value, a clean internal audit conducted by a law firm full of the Governor’s friends that also provided those lawyers with a $1 million payday.
Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).
