I would love to see Christie go down for this also.
Bridgegate verdict: Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly guilty on all counts
updated November 04, 2016 at 11:34 AM
NEWARK — Two former Christie administration insiders charged in a bizarre scheme of political retaliation against a mayor who refused to endorse the governor for re-election were found guilty Friday on all counts in the long-running Bridgegate saga.
In a seven-week trial that saw their own words used against them, Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly were convicted of helping orchestrate massive traffic tie-ups at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013. The plot was hatched to send a pointed message to Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, after he stepped back from his earlier public support of Gov. Chris Christie.
The jury passed a note to judge Friday morning, indicating it had reached a verdict. The decision came one day after U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton denied a defense motion to re-instruct the jury.
Attorneys started to filter back into the federal courthouse around 11 a.m. The jury began reading its findings just before 11:30 a.m. and delivered their guilty decision in rapid fire. Baroni and Kelly were charged on nine counts, and faced five of them together. The other four charges were split evenly, two each for the defendants.
The criminal case, built around a rarely used provision of a fraud statute that makes it a crime to "misapply" property of federal aid recipients, charged that Baroni and Kelly intentionally misapplied the property or money of the Port Authority.
The jury of seven women and five men heard from 35 witnesses, including both defendants who took the stand on their behalf. But the most damaging evidence might have been the now-infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email sent by Kelly less than a month before several local access toll lanes at the world's busiest bridge were inexplicably closed for nearly a week in September 2013, leading to paralyzing gridlock on local streets.
The key witness against them was David Wildstein, a Republican operative who was on the stand for eight days. Wildstein acknowledged he was the one who came up with the lane closure idea as a point of leverage against Sokolich, and testified that both Baroni and Kelly helped him put it in play.
Baroni, 44, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Kelly, also 44, who served as a deputy chief of staff to the governor, were indicted more than a year ago after a 16-month federal investigation into the scandal that loomed large over Christie's failed presidential aspirations.
The two had little contact with each other until the trial.
Appointed by Christie to the Port Authority in 2010, Baroni served as the agency's highest ranking New Jersey executive. Kelly, a single mother of four, ran the governor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. The middle man was Wildstein, who served as Kelly's day-to-day contact at the Port Authority after he was hired by Baroni to a $150,000 patronage job in a position created for him.
In his testimony, Wildstein, who pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the government in an effort to stay out of prison, called himself a "political junkie" whose sole mission was to advance the governor's agenda. He said he was the one who came up with the lane closure scheme as a possible pressure tactic against Sokolich as far back as 2011. But it was not triggered until 2013, say prosecutors, when Kelly determined that the Fort Lee mayor, a Democrat, was not going to endorse the governor for re-election.
Christie, then already planning to seek the Republican nomination for president, was looking to run up the number of Democrats endorsing him for the governor's race to show he had wide bi-partisan support and Sokolich was on a list of targeted Democrats.
In August 2013, Kelly sent Wildstein an email that said: "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." And on Sept. 9, 2013, Wildstein said he ordered Port Authority police to move the orange traffic cones setting aside two out of three toll lanes dedicated to Fort Lee traffic. With no warning to local officials or motorists, chaos ensued.
A look at the Bridgegate evidence
Emails, texts, photographs and video are part of the long list of documents being shown to the jury, as federal prosecutors and defense attorneys try to prove guilt and innocence in the high-profile George Washington Bridge scandal.
According to Wildstein, he created a cover story to disguise the true purpose of the lane closures, helping draft a Port Authority press release that claimed it was all part of a traffic study looking into ways to reduce congestion on the main approach to the George Washington Bridge toll plaza. Both Baroni and Kelly said they believed there actually was a traffic study, and became ensnared in a rouge political operation orchestrated by Wildstein.
Denying any knowledge of a plan of political retaliation, Kelly asserted during her four days on the witness stand that other higher-ups in the governor's office were told of the traffic study, long before it played out, and that no one seemed that concerned about it. "It just wasn't a big deal," she testified.
She struggled, however, to explain the language of her emails and texts, including one sent on the day of the lane closures as Wildstein boasted of the heavy traffic: "Is it wrong that I am smiling?"
Kelly also admitted deleting that and other incriminating messages as she came to believe that she was being set up as a scapegoat by administration officials who knew what Wildstein was up to.
Fort Lee Mayor seeks to move construction staging area away from luxury high rise.
Baroni was repeatedly confronted during trial over his failure for a week to respond to a series of emails, texts and phone calls from Sokolich, as the mayor tried to find out from someone in charge at the Port Authority to tell him why the traffic pattern had been changed. When Baroni forwarded the messages to Wildstein, he was instructed with the words "radio silence." The former state senator told the jury that Wildstein convinced him that any communication with the mayor would negatively affect the study at the bridge.
"I've asked myself that question a thousand times," Baroni said when asked why he listened to Wildstein.
Defense attorneys told jurors that the heart of the case rested almost entirely on the credibility of an admitted liar.
"Every road in this case leads through David Wildstein. Every statement, every allegation, every piece of evidence. Every conversation. Every imagined conversation by him. Everything," declared attorney Michael Baldassare, who represents Baroni. "You cannot convict Bill Baroni or Ms. Kelly unless you believe David Wildstein beyond a reasonable doubt."
Kelly's attorney, Michael Critchley, said Wildstein served as "Chris Christie's Rottweiler" at the Port Authority, who served as the governor's "enforcer" at the powerful bi-state agency.
"He's a manipulator," he said. "He plays games."
But assistant U.S. attorney Lee Cortes, in his summations to the jury, said Baroni, Kelly and Wildstein all saw themselves as the governor's "loyal lieutenants" who were free to use their public jobs to launch political attacks.
"They used their positions at the Port Authority and in the governor's office to execute a malicious scheme to punish a local mayor by needlessly leading innocent travelers, adults and children who were pawns in a political game into a paralyzing traffic jam that went on for days," he said. "They stopped people from moving freely about their community for no legitimate reason...just to mess with people, so they could send a clear and nasty political message. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes this a federal crime."
The U.S. Attorney's office, though, was faced from the start not only with a flawed witness, but the challenge of convincing a jury that a crime had been committed under circumstances where no money was taken and nobody was hurt, involving a conspiracy to create traffic at a place where traffic is the norm.
The government argued that the shutting down of traffic lanes to play hardball with a reluctant mayor was a misuse of federal funds, turning to a broadly written statue—Section 666 of Title 18 of the United States Code—intended to punish fraud, bribery, theft and embezzlement from agencies that receive federal funds. Prosecutors maintained that by co-opting the Port Authority's resources to execute a personal agenda at odds with the agency's public mission, they did not engage in "politics as usual."
The jury Friday voiced their say in the matter.
Take care of all of your memories, for you cannot relive them - Bob Dylan
