Tag: Chris Christie

Christie’s in

So, Chris Christie makes it official — he’s in the race and mainstream Republicans are ecstatic.

But should they be? New Jersey has become a consistently Democratic and Republicans, when forced to run in a contested primary, are forced to run to their right, making them less palatable to the general public.

And while the public is angry over the state of the state and not particularly pleased with Jon Corzine’s efforts, he doesn’t face the kind of deep anger we’ve seen directed at Jim Florio.

I want to point readers toward this quote from today’s Star-Ledger:

Christie could face trouble in the GOP primary, political experts said, drawing a parallel between a Christie-Lonegan matchup and the 2001 primary battle, when the party favorite, Bob Franks, was defeated by conservative Bret Schundler.

“The Republican primary can be captured by a conservative with a grassroots organization” like Lonegan’s Americans for Prosperity, said Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University. He said Christie needs to “show he’s conservative enough” and has a good chance to beat Corzine.

What’s missing? A paragraph that explains what happened to Schundler in the general election. What happened? He lost in a landslide.

That was followed by Corzine’s rather convincing defeat of Doug Forrester — just one year after a sitting Democratic governor resigned the governorship.

Republicans, in fact, have won only two statewide races since Republican Gov. Tom Kean’s two terms in office ended in 1989 — and those races, won by Christie Whitman, were won by slim margins following a massive tax revolt that shifted control of the state Legislature to the GOP. That shift lasted just eight years.

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In politics, appearance is reality

I should have touched on this yesterday, but it slipped beneath the radar thanks to some computer issues.

Nevertheless, what we have here is a story that is both very New Jersey and very Washington GOP. U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, widely believed to be angling for the Republican nod for governor in 2009, is coming under fire for handing a rather lucrative contract to monitor a settlement with a company facing criminal charges over to his former boss, former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

With no public notice and no bidding, the company awarded Mr. Ashcroft an 18-month contract worth $28 million to $52 million.

That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington learned about only several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the department’s procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large companies.
The contract between Mr. Ashcroft’s consulting firm, the Ashcroft Group, and Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana, has also drawn the attention of Congressional investigators.

The New Jersey prosecutor, United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie, directed similar monitoring contracts last year to two other former Justice Department colleagues from the Bush administration, as well as to a former Republican state attorney general in New Jersey.

The appearance here, as Christie himself notes, is not exactly above board.

Christie has defended the contract and appointment, pointing to Ashcroft’s integrity and his experience running the Justice Department. He also said Zimmer Holdings never objected to the appointment or to Ashcroft’s contract.

“I know the way our process worked internally there was no coercion,” Christie said in an interview yesterday. “But I also understand in the aftermath there was the perception of coercion, and you have to deal with that perception.”

And the perception is out there. The liberal blog Blue Jersey has been critical of Christie on a number of levels since an alleged investigation of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was leaked to the press in the waning hours of the 2006 Senate race. PolitickerNJ has picked up on it, as well. And even Harper’s has something on it.

Perhaps, this is all appearance. But appearance is reality in politics. Chris Christie has been hailed buy many as the white knight on a white horse battling corruption. While that always seemed overblown, his reputation had always been rather clean.

The Ashcroft contract, however, makes the other criticisms seem more valid — and leave Christie looking like nothing more than your garden-variety New Jersey politician.

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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Cult of Christie

There has been, among the people close to political power in the state, among those of us who consider ourselves reformers, a remarkable veneration for the U.S. Attorney for the state of New Jersey. Chris Christie has been described in an array of glowing terms, many earned for his dogged pursuit of corrupt politicians.

Christie has helped take down some high-level creeps: Sharpe James, John Lynch, Wayne Bryant and numerous others. But Christie’s targets have betrayed what maybe a partisan edge — nearly all are Democrats — and he has been tramping around the state in what appears to be campaign mode (the rumors are he is running for governor in 2009).

There maybe a legitimate reason for the partisan divide — Democrats control both houses of the state Legislature and hold nearly all the power in New Jersey. At the same time, it seems pretty fishy — especially given that word leaked out in the weeks before the 2006 election of an investigation into U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, who happened to be running for re-election in a contentious battle with state Sen. Tom Kean Jr.

This context makes this story so interesting. Christie gave a contract to monitor an implant maker as part of a settlement with the company to his former boss at the U.S. Justice Department.

Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was one of five private attorneys whom Christie hand-picked to monitor the implant makers. Now Ashcroft’s D.C.-based firm is poised to collect more than $52 million in 18 months, among the biggest payouts reported for a federal monitor.

Disclosed in SEC filings, the arrangement calls for Zimmer Holdings of Indiana to pay Ashcroft Group Consulting Services an average monthly fee between $1.5 million and $2.9 million. The figure includes a flat payment of $750,000 to the firm’s “senior leadership group,” individual legal and consulting services billed at up to $895 an hour, and as much as $250,000 a month for expenses including private airfare, lodging and meals.

Christie denies any wrong doing, but as Tom Moran, who has written glowingly about Christie in the past, points out, “This one has an odor to it.”

The central problem is that Christie has given himself oversized powers to call the shots in this cleanup. He can do that because the accused firm, Zimmer Holdings of Indiana, signed what’s known as a deferred prosecution agreement.

In plain terms, it means that the company has surrendered in the face of overwhelming criminal evidence and has agreed to let an outside monitor run the show.

Prosecutors across the country are using this weapon more and more. But often the monitors in other jurisdictions are selected by a judge or chosen through some collaborative process.

Christie made this choice himself. Yes, Zimmer Holdings could have objected, as it can object to the fees. But would you do that if you were the firm that just surrendered? Would you risk angering a monitor who is soon to become your lord and master?

And that is the problem.

Christie should be able to see the design flaw in this. And it’s not limited to the Ashcroft case — he gave another monitoring job to Dave Samson, the former attorney general and a major political fund-raiser.

Yes, guys like Ashcroft and Samson would probably raise money for Christie anyway. But this is New Jersey, and we have earned the right to suspect that a truckload of cash might have an effect.

Even for someone with the squeaky-clean reputation, like Chris Christie.

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Terror alert

I resisted the urge to comment yesterday on the Fort Dix terror arrests, but having had some time to think about what happened and having heard Keith Olbermann’s comments, I thought I’d weigh in.

First, if the information released by the feds is correct, then the six men arrested should face some jail time — significant time.

Second, and this is where the Olbermann comments come in, there was a breathless quality to the reporting yesterday, taking what were a half dozen somewhat ineffectual terrorist wannabes and elevating them to mastermind status. As I said, these guys deserve jail time, but we shouldn’t turn this into more than it was.

Consider the basic facts as reported:

A suspect brings a videotape of some of the men “shooting assault weapons at a firing range, shouting in Arabic and calling for jihad, or holy war” to a South Jersey video store. The clerk reports the tape’s contents to police and the FBI becomes involved. The group spends time discussing its plot — which at various times included attacks on Fort Dix and the Army-Navy football game — and engages in a second weapons training in the Poconos.

Based on what has been reported, The FBI and police acted appropriately — they cannot afford to take chances — though the announcement was not made without the kind of hyperbole that has come to characterize the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism investigations. Consider this comment from yesterday’s press conference (above photo from New York Times):

“This is a new brand of terrorism where a small cell of people can bring enormous devastation,” Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, said at an afternoon news conference at the courthouse here.

And this:

“Today we dodged a bullet,” J. P. Weiss, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Philadelphia office, said at the news conference. “In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.”

Mr. Weiss added: “We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons. Luckily, we were able to stop that.”

Again, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of a potential attack, but the rhetoric here seems to be way out of proportion with the facts. The New York Times, in its front page story today, offered a glimpse at the kind of self control that the media should have shown:

The arrests came after a 15-month investigation during which the F.B.I. and two informers who had infiltrated the group taped them training with automatic weapons in rural Pennsylvania, conducting surveillance of military bases in the Northeast, watching videos of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers and trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles.

The authorities described the suspects as Islamic extremists and said they represented the newest breed of threat: loosely organized domestic militants unconnected to — but inspired by — Al Qaeda or other international terror groups.

But the criminal complaint that details the plot describes an effort that was alternately ambitious and clumsy, with the men at turns declaring themselves eager to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah and worrying about getting arrested or deported for buying weapons or possessing a map of a military base.

Simple, to the point, the paper encapsulates the entire affair in a few paragraphs, giving the details of the arrests and plot, without blowing the plot out of proportion.

In the end, however, I think Keith Olbermann’s comments on the media storm are probably on target:

The ultimate premise of the war in Iraq and the ultimate premise, certainly, of the Republican presidential campaign ahead, counterterrorism. The FBI claims it has broken up a plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey. The flaw, though, in the breathless reporting of the purported terror cell, the bureau infiltrated the six-person group after its members took video of themselves practicing with assault weapons, brought the tape to a photo store, and had it transferred to a DVD.

The details of the supposed plot don‘t seem to hold together that well either, though that did not stop extensive and entirely credulous coverage on TV, the Internet, in print today. The men supposedly had plans to gain access to the base disguised as pizza delivery guys, then cut the power somehow, they, quote, “hit four, five, or six Humvees and light the whole place, and retreat without any losses.” And take the tape of yourselves practicing and have it copied at PhotoMat. In other words, the FBI has arrested six morons.

Perhaps a bit too strong, but then these were not the 9-11 hijackers and this was not the major coup that it is being painted as. What we have is a solid piece of law enforcement.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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