Today, Explained - A George Washington Bridge too far

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

The Supreme Court is trying to settle the fight over the biggest traffic jam in the history of American politics once and for all. WNYC's Matt Katz, author of "American Governor: Chris Christie's Bridge to Redemption," explains. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. You might have noticed Chief Justice John Roberts is working two jobs right now. He's refereeing the Senate trial of President Trump in addition to running the Supreme Court of the United States. And back at the Supreme Court, a very famous case is being discussed and decided. I used to work at WNYC New York Public Radio, and basically the entire time I worked there, we had a reporter named Matt Katz who basically covered just this one case. He won a Peabody for it. He wrote a book about it.

The case is called Bridgegate. Yeah, and it was a perfect story for us because we encompass the New York City and New Jersey region. And at any given time, there's somebody listening to WNYC stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge. And this started basically with a mysterious traffic jam. There was a multi-day traffic jam on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, and we couldn't figure out why it happened and why there was so much buzz about there being something shady about it. And that is what became the Bridgegate scandal. It resulted in federal criminal convictions, and it was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, those convictions.

The Bridgegate scandal is headed to the Supreme Court. The court agreed to hear an appeal involving two aides to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. And the reason why it's so important is it could really change the way political corruption is prosecuted in this country from here on out, depending on how the justices rule on this case. Okay, so them's the stakes. They heard oral arguments last week. But before we get to all that, take us back to when this whole thing started, would you? So September 9th, 2013 was the first day of school in a little borough called Fort Lee. It is adjacent to the George Washington Bridge.

And on that day, there was a ton of traffic in town. Quality traffic is a nightmare. The GW Bridge is totally gridlocked. There are three lanes that go to the George Washington Bridge from the town of Fort Lee. The rest of the main lanes that go to the George Washington Bridge are coming off a highway. So a lot of people who live near Fort Lee and all over Bergen County, they go through Fort Lee to get to the bridge.

It's just the best way to do it. However, two of those three lanes were shut down without warning, without explanation on September 9th, 2013. That meant that there was absolute gridlock in Fort Lee and the town surrounding it to the point that school buses with children going to school, some kindergartners on their first day of school were in their school buses for hours. And we know that people were late for dialysis appointments. We know that people missed job interviews. There were ambulance drivers who literally had to get out of their vehicles

and run to the scene of incidents, other emergencies. The traffic ended around 10 a.m. And then again, it started the next morning. And then it happened again, September 11th. And then again on September 12th. And nobody could figure out what was happening. Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich declined to comment on camera, but during a phone interview, he told me he doesn't know the reasons behind the lane closures. And the mayor of Fort Lee was freaking out, calling everybody to figure out why there

was so much traffic and then why these lanes to the George Washington Bridge were closed. So the people he called were over at the Port Authority, which is this massive agency run by New York and New Jersey. It's run by appointees of the governor of New York and the governor of New Jersey. They run and operate all the bridges and tunnels, and they have complete control over the George Washington Bridge, which happens to be the busiest bridge in the world. So this mayor is calling the Port Authority, can't figure out what's going on. And finally, finally, traffic is alleviated on Friday morning

after this went for a full week because the lanes are reopened. And then the question is, what the hell happened and why did this happen? Wow. What a story. How does this go from a traffic jam to a political scandal? The reason why the lanes reopened on Friday is because the New York side of the Port Authority got wind of it. They ordered the lanes reopened and the New Yorkers think that the New Jerseyans were up to something really shady by closing these lanes. And that prompts the Democrats in the New Jersey legislature to hold a hearing.

The governor is Chris Christie, a Republican, and his top appointee at the Port Authority, his main guy at the Port Authority, is Bill Barone, a former Republican legislator in New Jersey. So the Democrats haul Bill Barone before a committee hearing and they say, what was going on with this traffic jam? And Bill Barone said, we were just conducting a traffic study. On the first day of school. On the first day of school. The data shows that clearly the main line, traffic from everywhere else goes down. The wait time goes down. Traffic from everywhere else goes down. Wait time goes down. Traffic from Fort Lee went up. Did you give anybody prior notice? No, that would skew the results of the traffic study. Do you have any results of this traffic study that you apparently conducted?

No, we weren't able to finish it because the lanes were reopened by the New York side. What I would like to know is whether or not you have an email trail. You're trying to tell us that this major, a study that had a major disruption on your major bridge has no paper trail, that there is not a single email that explains how this was done. That defies all logic and nobody in this room believes that. I have sat here, Assemblywoman, and answered the questions. I have told you what happened. What you will not answer are to the 585 people in your district who sit in more traffic because of the special lanes. What do you say to them? He gave a performance, I would call it, that seemed implausible. So the Democrats keep going and they subpoena a bunch of documents. In the meantime, Christie wins re-election in

New Jersey by a massive margin. A second-term win that solidifies his place as one of the GOP's premier politicians. Listen, we're New Jersey. We still fight. We still yell. But when we fight, we fight for those things that really matter in people's lives. It was now December. This traffic jam started in September. It was sort of one of these mini controversies that hadn't even bubbled up to the point that anybody thought to ask him.

So I asked him if he had anything to do with closing the lanes of the George Washington Bridge, and he gave me a sarcastic answer, the tape of which will be on my tombstone because I feel like it was the most famous encounter I've ever had in my life. He said, I worked the cones, actually, Matt. Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there. I was in overalls and a hat. He said, I was out there moving the cones, Matt. You cannot be serious with that question, as if he was the guy who decided to close the lanes for some crazy reason. He said he knew nothing about it, and the Democrats were on

some sort of bizarre witch hunt. Sounds familiar. Yes. The witch hunt continues, though. And January 8th, 2014, I remember I was at a cafe eating shakshuka, and we got a copy of an email that the Democrats had obtained. And the email came from Christie's deputy chief of staff, and it was written to her contact at the Port Authority, the New Jersey side of the Port Authority. And the email said, time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.

It was written over three weeks before the traffic jam, and that was the smoking gun. Now we knew that there was an intentionally set traffic jam, and then everything began to unravel from there. Why was this traffic jam created? Because the mayor of Fort Lee had not endorsed Christie for re-election, for his 2013 gubernatorial re-election. It was maddening. Who would close down lanes to the busiest bridge in the world to get to me? The mayor of Fort Lee was a Democrat, but Christie was a Republican. But Christie at the time was trying to prepare for a campaign for president.

And his whole shtick, what he was going to be running on, was as a bipartisan leader, somebody who could get Democrats to support him, which he had done in his reelection, who could get African-American voters and Hispanic voters, which he had done in his reelection to an unusually high degree for reelection. And the mayor was then punished with this traffic jam under the cover of a traffic study. And we soon learned as charges that were then filed, like, who did this and whether Christie had anything to do with it or whether it was his people. And that's what consumed us in the press and federal prosecutors for the next couple of years, trying to unravel why Bridget Kelly, Deputy Chief of Staff to the governor, wrote this email, time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee. Governor Christie has repeatedly denied any involvement or knowledge in what would soon be called Bridgegate.

I had no role in authorizing it. I had no knowledge of it. And there has been no evidence ever put forward that I did. As this continues and it becomes pretty clear that this was a concerted effort to cause problems in Fort Lee as retaliation, did anyone have any genuine question as to whether Governor Christie was involved?

Yeah, because the players involved were so tightly aligned with him. We would eventually learn that a man named David Wildseen was the one who came up with this idea. He had actually been the statistician on Christie's high school baseball team and was a political blogger in New Jersey. He was also something of like a dark arts political operative. He was the guy who, for example, before a senatorial debate with Frank Lautenberg sometime

in the 1980s, Frank Lautenberg was the Democrat. He stole Lautenberg's suit jacket, and so Lautenberg would look ridiculous during the televised debate. It was that kind of stuff. And when Christie became governor, he created a position for Wildstein at the Port Authority to support Christie's political causes.

And that's why he concocted this scheme. And to help him carry it out, he enlisted Bridget Kelly, Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bill Barone, who was actually Wildstein's boss, the guy who had gone to the state legislature and concocted this bogus story

about there being a traffic study. Wildstein would end up charged and indicted by the feds. And he pleaded guilty and decided to cooperate with the feds. And then they then indicted Bridget Kelly and Bill Barone and David Wildstein testified against them. And what happens? Are they convicted? and fraud. They were charged with civil rights violations for interfering with people's right to intrastate travel, their right to drive around New Jersey. And they were due to go to prison. They appealed. Bill Barone says, you know what? I'm going to get this over with. So last April, he reports to a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Bridget Kelly has four kids. She wants to delay

when she's going to go to prison for as long as possible so she's going to now appeal to the Supreme Court but nobody thinks the Supreme Court's going to take this case it's about traffic in New Jersey and it doesn't seem to be any like major issues that the Supreme Court would want to delve into so Bridget's at home getting ready for her ex-husband to move into her house so she can go to prison in July. Bill's in the gym at the prison in Pennsylvania working out, and they get a call at the Supreme Court last June, decides to actually take this case.

A year ago, I walked into federal prison, and I never dreamed that the Supreme Court of the United States would agree to hear our case. And here we are. And that's where we are today because oral arguments were finally heard on this case and Bridget Kelly and Bill Barone showed up. Well, Bill Barone gets out of prison. He got out of prison the day after they decided to take the case out on bail pending the Supreme Court's decision. And Bridget Kelly doesn't have to go to prison because she's waiting on the Supreme Court. It was a miracle, as far as they were concerned, that the Supreme Court decided to intervene. Matt's back after the break. And put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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with iGaming Ontario. Why did the Supreme Court decide to take this case, Matt? You know, smarter legal minds than I say that it's because they want to drop these convictions to keep Kelly and Barone out of prison. As we argued today to the Supreme Court, there is a clear difference between politics and crime. And the way the justices were peppering the attorney for the government at the Supreme Court indicated that they just might do that later this year when they make a ruling. Some of the justices were skeptical. Justin Stephen Breyer said,

quote, I don't know how this case works. When the Supreme Court heard the case on January 14th, they seemed to really be focusing on two questions. And one was the question of these fraud charges and whether the defendants had really obtained property through fraud, which is what the statute says, because they didn't get anything out of it. There was no bribe. They didn't get any cash. They just got potentially a political victory by punishing the mayor. And Justice Breyer said, Now, that is not a good thing to do. It is really undesirable, and maybe it should be a crime.

But 30 years in prison? That, I'm not sure. These guys, by the way, are only getting 13 months for Kelly, 18 months for Barone. So I don't know where Breyer got 30 years in prison, but he's saying it's not really a crime. You're just kind of reallocating public property. So they had some real concerns about that. And then the other piece of it was the

government was trying to establish that the lie, the coverup, the fact that they said this was because of a traffic study, that that indicated fraud. But in order to do that, they've really kind of twisted themselves in a pretzel because they have to say that Bill Barone didn't have the authority to close the lanes because somebody with the authority, according to the law, can do whatever they want. They can close lanes for whatever reason they want to. Even if they lie about the real reason, it's not illegal. So the justices seemed wholly unconvinced that this constituted a federal crime. Isn't it often the case that somebody who has the authority to do

something may lie about why the person is doing the thing because if the real reason was exposed, there would be a lot, it would cause a furor. People would be angry, but that doesn't show the person doesn't have the authority. It sounds like there's some serious checks on power hanging in the balance here, though. Like, is the assumption that if you're elected into executive office, be it a mayoralty or the governorship or even the presidency, that you can pretty much do whatever you want so long as you're not directly breaking the law? That's what the justices seem to be

saying, that there are other remedies, as they call it in legal parlance for this. So the remedies for a boneheaded traffic study would be to vote out the people who conducted it. The Supreme Court in recent years has been reluctant to give federal prosecutors tools to fight political corruption as if that's not their job. Because what it comes down to is if the Bridgegate convictions stand, then more political corruption will be illegal, essentially. And if it doesn't stand, then more political corruption will be allowed. It feels like this whole case is just about lying. Yeah.

And whether or not politicians should be able to lie. Do you feel like as someone who's covered this story for years now, who wrote a book about it, do people care about that? Is there an appetite for that? I think they do. Chris Christie was never charged with a crime here, but he went from being one of the most popular governors in the country to the least popular governor in the country because New Jersey turned on him because they decided that either he or his people had lied. And that really permeated over into the presidential campaign when Christie then announced the run for president. We need to have strength and decision-making and authority back in the Oval Office. And that is why today I am proud to announce my candidacy

for the Republican nomination for President of the United States of America. He never was able to recapture the magic and the popularity that he once had, because if you remember the original Chris Christie during the Obama years, he was a guy who was going to tell everybody the straight truth. Are you stupid? On topic. Next question. If he needed to hug Obama after Hurricane Sandy, he would do that. If he needed to stick it to Republicans, he would do that. If he needed to talk smack to a reporter, he would do that. And he had this, there was an authenticity about him. Thank you all very much. And I'm sorry for the idiot over there.

And Bridgegate, because of the lie inherent in it, really made people doubt whether that authenticity was a bunch of BS. I am not a bully. He went from leading the field for 2016 Republican presidential candidates to finishing like sixth in the New Hampshire primary and dropping out right after that. And none other than President Trump himself reportedly said that if it wasn't for Bridgegate, he would have never even run. It created such an opening for somebody else that Donald Trump was able to fill the void. The George Washington Bridge. He knew about it. Hey, how do you have breakfast with people every day of your lives? They're closing up the largest

bridge in the world during rush hour. They're with them all the time, the people that did it. They never said, Chris, tonight we're closing up the George Washington Bridge because the mayor of a certain area is against you. Oh, OK. They didn't mention. Nobody believes that. And, you know, now there's no more lying in politics. So everything is good now. And maybe worse still than losing his shot at the presidency

and having his pal Donald take it instead, his one true hero, Bruce Springsteen, crossed the bridge to New York to make fun of him on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He told me that he could never even watch that clip, but it was amazing, and I hope you play it. In the day we sweated out on the streets Stuck in traffic on the GWB

They shut down the Toe Boots of Glory Cause we didn't endorse Christie Hey, Matt Katz, this was a real pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sean. Pleasure is mine. Matt Katz and his colleagues over at WNYC won a Peabody for their coverage of Bridgegate. He is the author of American Governor Chris Christie's Bridge to Redemption.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. The show's made by Bridget McCarthy, Halima Shah, Amina Alsadi, Jillian Weinberger, Afim Shapiro, and Noam Hassenfeld, who also does some of our music. The rest of the music's done by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Olivia Ekstrom is our fact checker, and the show was engineered today and yesterday by Paul Mounzer. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we are growing. If you or someone you know might be interested in making podcasts with us,

check out the Vox Media Careers page. Thanks. There'll be no partisan divisions Let me wrap my legs round your mighty rims And relieve your stressful condition You got Wall Street masters stuck cheek to cheek With blue collar truckers And man, I really gotta take a leak But I can't I'm stuck in Governor Chris Christie's fault

Late New Jersey traffic jam I really gotta take a leak Down in Jersey land