| TPM is out with a story today that almost creates more questions than it answers, due to a heavily redacted FBI file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The players are US Attorney, now governor, Chris Christie and the John Adler, before his election to Congress while he was still a NJ state senator. Given what we know about Christie, what comes to light today appears to suggest more about him, and the way he used his federal office for politically-motivated witch hunts - which were often successful - than it does the late John Adler.
You can examine documents in John Adler's FBI file here.
The documents detail an investigation approved by U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, following information from a cooperating witness who approached the FBI's Philadelphia division in June, 2007 with a story that Senator Adler's support - for a 2005 law placing inspection contracts under "local public contract law" -was corrupt.
The case was later closed for lack of evidence, and was not an issue in Adler's successful run for congress the following year. You can read the details of what was investigated in TPM's post. There appears, at least with documents so heavily redacted, to be nothing to the cooperating witness' suspicions about Adler, nothing actionable. There's no evidence Adler even knew there was an investigation. An Adler confidante suggested to TPM that the cooperating witness may have "had a bone to pick with Adler.'
That would have been catnip to Chris Christie.
Jump with me, for the rest.
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| There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Bush-era Justice Department singled out its targets for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections, with the cooperation of Bush AG Alberto Gonzales. The House Judiciary Committee investigated the Justice Department in 2007 for this.
The year before the Adler investigation, USA Chris Christie was investigating Senator Bob Menendez, another case that went nowhere, apparently because it was groundless. But in 2006, as Menendez was fighting to keep his Senate seat, word of the investigation somehow leaked, and predictably became a campaign issue. The entire episode seemed politically motivated; the investigation, conducted during the campaign, involved a building Menendez had sold years before. There was nothing pressing, and apparently, there was nothing to it.
In fact, Chris Christie's conduct and decisions during his tenure as United States Attorney were also the subject of a 2009 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, for Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA's) he oversaw while he was US Attorney for the State of New Jersey. At issue, a fat monitoring contract to former US Attorney David Kelley, who let Christie's brother, Todd, off the hook in a stock fraud case that hauled in indictments for 15 other people. He was a busy man then, running for office and apparently unwilling to sit for uncomfortable questions. Christie, citing a train he had to catch, got up and walked out of the hearing room. (Video).
It was on his reputation as United States Attorney that Chris Christie campaigned for Governor, convincing voters in a 3-way election that he was the law-and-order candidate who would transform Trenton with his governmental transparency and a prosecutor's ability to separate right from wrong. He almost became president off that trajectory. And transform Trenton he did. But not with transparency, with law and order, or any ability to see right from wrong.
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