A Taxpayer Funded Whitewash for Chris Christie

The news media is awash with denunciations of the $1 million "investigation" done by Chris Christie's attorneys at New Jersey taxpayer expense.  Not surprisingly, Christie's attorneys exonerated Christie from any involvement in or knowledge of Traffic Gate.  Also not surprisingly, the "investigation" and subsequent report failed to involve interviews with critical players and never once contains a direct quote of Christie's statements to his supposed investigators.  In short, the conclusion was known before the attorneys churned out their $1 million report.  The New York Times takes Christie and the investigators to task.  Here are editorial excerpts:

Lawyers hired by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey at public expense issued their findings Thursday on the traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge in September, apparently engineered as a bizarre form of political revenge. To no one’s surprise, Mr. Christie’s lawyers have found his hands to be clean. He was without fault, they declared. This glossy political absolution cost the taxpayers of New Jersey more than $1 million in legal fees. 

We can now add this expensive whitewash to the other evidence of trouble in Mr. Christie’s administration. If Mr. Christie really wants to win back public trust, he and his political allies can start by paying for this internal inquiry out of their own pockets. Then the governor and these lawyers can make all emails and any other crucial information available to federal and state investigators. 

In the report, lawyers from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher said they interviewed 70 people, including Mr. Christie, and studied 250,000 documents, including private phone records for Mr. Christie and his top aides. The lead lawyer, Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor in Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, boasted that his work was “comprehensive and exhaustive.” 

Not exactly.

The report lays the blame for this entire scandal on two of Mr. Christie’s former colleagues, who refused to be interviewed. One was Bridget Anne Kelly, who was Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff until he called her a liar at a news conference and fired her in January. The other was David Wildstein, a former Christie ally and appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who resigned last year. 

Similarly, Mayor Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken, N.J., who is cooperating with federal investigators, declined to talk with the governor’s legal team.  . . . . Without her side of the story, the report nevertheless concludes that her allegations are “demonstrably false” and “do not match objective reality.” 

The Mastro report reveals that Mr. Wildstein told Mr. Christie’s press secretary that he did inform Mr. Christie about the traffic tie-ups as they were happening. The report said Mr. Christie did not remember any such conversation, and simply leaves it at that.  

It makes the absurd assertion that “events in Kelly’s personal life may have had some bearing on her subjective motivations and state of mind,” insinuating that emotional distress might have caused her to orchestrate a traffic jam affecting tens of thousands of commuters. 

Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the co-chairman of the state legislative committee investigating the Christie scandals, said Thursday that the Mastro report reads more like a novel than an investigative report and lacked “objectivity and thoroughness.”  

Mr. Christie has a long way to go to regain public trust and clear his name in this scandal. That will happen only if the real investigators — the state legislative committee and the United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman — can interview all those possibly involved under oath and examine the emails and all documents that can shed more light on the way Mr. Christie operates.