Christie Allies Found Guilty on All Counts in Bridgegate Trial
William "Bill" Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, left, and Bridget Anne Kelly, former deputy chief of staff for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, center. Photo by Peter Foley/Bloomberg News.Two former allies of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were convicted of joining a partisan plot to create crippling traffic near the George Washington Bridge as punishment for a local mayor who wouldn’t support the governor’s 2013 re-election.
Jurors found Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni guilty in the petty vendetta that exposed the underbelly of New Jersey politics and helped torpedo the ambitions of Christie, once a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and now an adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign.
Kelly and Baroni’s lawyers have already laid the groundwork for an appeal after challenging instructions that jurors could convict without considering their motive for the plot. Sentencing is set for Feb. 21. The pair face years in prison.
The Bridgegate trial put on display the grubbiness of New Jersey politics, where World Trade Center wreckage was passed out as political favors. It cast a particularly harsh light on Christie, who was portrayed as a vicious, obscenity-spewing bully who Kelly said knew about the lane closings in advance, despite his denials.
Christie’s political ambitions were central to the plot during the first week of school in September 2013, prosecutors said. Commuters, ambulances and school buses were stuck in traffic in the neighboring borough of Fort Lee after the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which operates the bridge, closed two of three local access lanes to the span.
Prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of David Wildstein, Baroni’s right-hand man at the Port Authority and the government’s star witness. Wildstein, who pleaded guilty in a bid for leniency, said he hatched the plan to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich. Over a riveting eight days of testimony, he detailed how Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, and Baroni, then the governor’s top executive at the Port Authority, helped him put the scheme into motion.
Wildstein said he and Baroni kept Christie informed of the plot, sharing a “one-constituent” rule of placing the governor’s interests above all else. Kelly sent him the infamous e-mail on Aug. 13, 2013, that said: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Wildstein responded, "Got it."
In the ensuing weeks, Wildstein said, he arranged for the Port Authority to close the lanes without notifying Fort Lee or motorists. He said Baroni blessed his plans, and that he took orders from Kelly, who oversaw a staff that moonlighted as Christie campaign workers and kept track of which elected officials endorsed the governor.
Sokolich and his police chief told jurors about the chaos caused by the lane closings, hampering emergency services and creating what the mayor called "concrete gridlock." Baroni ignored Sokolich’s increasingly desperate pleas, the mayor said. Wildstein testified that he agreed with Baroni and Kelly on the response: “Radio silence.”
The standoff ended when Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, an appointee of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, ordered the lanes reopened on the fifth morning.
Kelly and Baroni each took the witness stand and said they didn’t intend to punish Sokolich — the core of the government’s case against them. Rather, they said, they believed Wildstein when he said the lane closings were part of a study examining ways to speed traffic over the world’s busiest span. Lawyers for Kelly and Baroni assailed Wildstein as a dangerous liar and Christie’s enforcer at the Port Authority who framed their clients to please prosecutors and reduce a possible 15-year prison term.
Kelly claimed she was scapegoated by the Christie administration. In his summation, her attorney, Michael Critchley, called Christie a “coward” for not testifying in court. The governor wasn’t called by either side.
The six-week trial also provided a rare inside peek at the day-to-day machinations of Christie’s political apparatus. Jurors heard about his Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, where Kelly worked and staffers maintained a spreadsheet to track gifts and favors to elected officials and how likely they were to endorse Christie.
Kelly’s office dangled such Port Authority inducements as tours of the World Trade Center site and steel remnants from the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Mayors got a chance to sit in the governor’s box at New York Giants football games or have breakfast with Christie at his mansion.
The effort to woo Democrats was part of a broader push to cast Christie as a bipartisan leader and top contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Elected officials were ranked from 1 to 10 on their likelihood to endorse Christie. Sokolich got a 4.
