Daily Record hits back on Bucco blame claims

by: Jason Springer

Fri May 29, 2009 at 02:15:00 PM EDT

His e-mail included this line: "His coronary event was triggered just following a phone conversation with a member of the press who related to my father the details of the sleazy and untrue accusations against him that were being circulated by another challenger's campaign." (Full disclosure: the member of the press was Fred Snowflack, Daily Record editorial page editor).

OK, but as campaigns go, this has not been a particularly nasty one.

In fact, the senior Bucco has endured many tougher campaigns in a more than 20-year political career, with the most recent one being defending his seat from a well-financed challenge from Democrat Blair MacInnes in 2003.

The "sleazy and untrue allegations" in this year's Assembly primary revolve around the senator allegedly making phone calls to other Republicans in an effort to solicit political and financial support for his son. This is not exactly unheard of, and given the fact none of those receiving those reported calls have said so publicly -- courage is in short supply these days -- it's a moot issue.

We join Anthony M. Bucco in wishing his father the best, but we must seriously question if anything happening in Morris County politics caused the senator's medical problem. In the absence of a pronouncement by an attending physician, let's not politicize a man having a heart attack.

Daily Record on NJ-11 Race: "I Guess We Endorse Frelinghuysen; Hope He'll Be More Like Wyka"

by: Jeff Gardner

Fri Oct 31, 2008 at 12:06:40 PM EDT

has been resolute in his support of the war in Iraq and generally loyal to President Bush. It's hard to know where belief ends and loyalty to party and president begins. If nothing else, the past eight years have shown that party unity doesn't always equal good or productive government. More often than not, it has led to, at best, stalled initiatives and, at worst, grievous mistakes.

And, his opponent?

Wyka, of Parsippany, who is making his second try for Congress, has expanded his campaign this year beyond criticizing the war in Iraq. He backs public financing of elections and increased government involvement in health care, a key point in a nation where an estimated 47 million are without health insurance.

I know - call on Rodney, if reelected, to be more like Tom:

Unless lightning strikes, Frelinghuysen will win his eighth term. We hope that he will recognize an opportunity -- if not a mandate -- for a new approach. We hope the congressman will use his seniority to stake out new and independent positions when the status quo has failed. We hope he will sharpen his appetite for "best-practice" approaches to long-standing problems (see Wyka and [Indy candidate Chandler] Tedholm above), regardless of which party suggests them.

What's Christie Got on Fred Snowflack?

by: huntsu

Tue Nov 27, 2007 at 10:26:04 AM EST

Christie, who has done a great job putting political crooks in jail, has earned the privilege of getting the benefit of the doubt. Ashcroft's firm may do a great job for a price that will be much less than $52 million.

May do a great job?  Sure, so could a ton of other lawfirms that didn't give Christie a job.  And the only evidence Snowflack has that this "will be much less than $52 million" is Chris Christie's word, and that's what is in doubt right now. 

Point two on the $52 million is that Snowflack knows government contracts -- particularly no-bid contracts with little external oversight -- usually run over budget not under.  Oh, unless it's Super Christie handing out the contract.  Because we trust him.

This is about the most blatant case of misdirection I've seen since the Daily Record refused to reveal which story Chris Christie told them about his near-miss in the US Attorney firings.

Snowflack ignores the vast body of evidence out there that Christie bought his job, something that really should be noted when you are talking about sending $52 million contracts to the guy who gave Christie the job.  Imagine if a Democrat donated $500K to the state and national party, got a job worth hundreds of thousands, and then gave million dollar no-bid contracts to high-profile Dems?  There would be a bloodbath, but for Super Christie he gets a pass.

Snowflack completely ignores that the Bush Justice Department is under a number of investigations into how it used its powers for partisan and personal gain, and that the move to a partisan use of federal policing powers happened under John Ashcroft -- the very guy who got Christie's $52 million contract.

Snowflack also ignores the tendency -- noted on Blue Jersey in the past and on PoliticsNJ PolitickerNJ today the strange tendency of subpoenas, leaks and press releases to come out at times opportune for Christie and the Republicans and damaging to the Democrats.

Snowflack further ignores the Christie hissy fit when a Democrat put a temporary block on the appointment of Stu Abner to the state Supreme Court while totally ignoring a Morris County Republican Senator doing the same thing for the Morris County Prosecutor.

The fact is that Christie doesn't have a clean record anywhere but in the newspapers and editorial pages.  He no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, if he ever did.  His office has made a significant dent in the massive problem of public corruption in our state, but also has made a significant dent in the non-partisan image of the US Attorney's office.

Christie Still Hasn't Denied the Story

by: huntsu

Fri Aug 24, 2007 at 12:22:09 PM EDT

Well, Chris Christie's PR guy Michael Drewniak had a series of e-mail conversations with the site about it, asking us to take down the story and to issue a retraction.  Since the paper in question told three different versions of the story, we said no but that we would happily do so if Chris Christie issued a statement on what he said or the paper released a transcript of the meeting.  Frankly there is just too much confusion over the story to know what the heck happened without someone who was in the room telling us.

Blue Jersey asked Drewniak for such a statement at least four times and he ignored, then resisted, then belittled the repeated request.

Well, it's been 10 days and we are still waiting. 

So now the question is not just, "What was actually said?" but "Why won't Chris Christie tell us what was said?"

All he has to do is release a sentence like this: "I did not give a date for when I heard I was on the list;" or this: "I told them I learned I was on the list in March;" or this: "I did tell them the December/January version."

It's not a hard lift here to just give us a sentence telling the truth.  But Drewniak and Christie are refusing to do it.

One reason could be Christie thinks Blue Jersey is beneath him, and is not a real media outlet that he should respond to.  Considering that we have audio podcasts of US Senators and op-eds from US House members, we're at least as real as most papers out there.

Another reason could be that Christie thinks we are just a partisan web site out to get him.  Might be that he's not too far off on that, but in this case we're offering him the chance to -- in just a sentence or two -- remove all doubt and blunt our accusations.

The third reason is that he really did tell two different stories to different papers, and got his buddies at the Daily Record to cover for him.  If you read the partial transcript Christie is joking about baseball teams with the editors instead of tackling hard questions, and when he refuses to answer they don't do follow-up.  Maybe Christie is refusing to tell us which story he told (December/January, no date or March) at the meeting because the transcript might get out and prove him a liar?  If that were true, his best bet is not to go on the record with another lie to cover the first one.

Which one is it?

We Don't Know Because They Won't Tell Us

by: Blue Jersey

Tue Aug 14, 2007 at 07:58:51 PM EDT

We're no longer comfortable calling it a lie, but we are now quite sure there is a three part contradiction.  The problem is that we no longer know why there is such a glaring contradiction, or who made the contradiction.  It could be a bad reporting error, or it could have been Mr. Christie.  We just don't know.

At issue is what was really said in the Editorial Board meeting.  The Daily Record's Michael Daigle first reported on August 3 that Mr. Christie said in the meeting that he was notified in December he was on the list, and then in January he was off the list.  This conflicted with previous stories that quoted Mr. Christie saying he found out at one time in March.

Such a contradiction is important because of the long history of misstatements, contradictions and outright fibs by the people involved in the firing of as many as eight US Attorneys in late 2006.  After more than eight months of hearings, reporting and subpoenas we are no closer to learning the truth regarding that political partisan use of the Department of Justice and its US Attorneys than we were at the beginning all because of the obfuscation and lies.  If, in fact, US Attorney Christie was lying about his part in the unfolding drama it is an important story.  So Blue Jersey pursued it.

Blue Jersey e-mailed an editor at the Daily Record who was in the meeting if he could explain the contradiction, and he replied:

Yes, I was in the room. I am afraid I can not explain the inconsistency

We took that as a confirmation that Mr. Christie had indeed made the December/January claim and continued to pursue the story.  This second source was why we were comfortable calling the contradiction a lie on Mr. Christie's part, and is one of the reasons we are reluctant to determine that a retraction is necessary.

The following Sunday, August 5, the Daily Record published (firewalled) what appears to be an edited transcript of the meeting that makes no reference to a timetable, and never mentions December, January or March in any context.  This is the only reference to the lists:

Q: Your name was on "the list" of U.S. attorneys to be fired, was it not?
A: I talked to the deputy attorney general. He didn't give me an explanation as to why I was on the list, or why I was taken off. I dodged a bullet, and I'm still here and I still have a job to do. I decided to move on. In some people's minds, I was not loyal enough, too independent. I don't really know. They didn't give me an explanation. And I'm not really pursuing one.

Then on Thursday, August 9 the Daily Record published a retraction that maintains during the Editorial Board meeting Mr. Christie said he'd learned of his place on the list in March.

U.S. Attorney Chris Christie said he learned he had been on -- and then taken off -- the list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired last March. A story Friday gave an incorrect date.

In three published versions of this story based on one conversation the Daily Record claims that Chris Christie:

• Said he learned in December 2006 he was on the list, and in January 2007 he was off the list;
• Did not mention a date when he learned he was on or off the list; and
• Said he learned he was on and off the list in March.

In an August 13 e-mail to Blue Jersey founder Juan Melli, Chris Christie's public relations officer, Michael Drewniak, maintains that because of the August 9 retraction that there is no contradiction and:

Given that the sole source of your commentary was wrong and has been corrected by the Daily Record, it seems reasonable, and in the interests of fairness and accuracy, that you remove the same inaccuracies from your website.

But as we noted earlier, in addition to the article, we had a second confirmation from an editor at the paper. We have confirmed the correction with the Daily Record, and they claim that it was reporter error.  But that doesn't explain how one meeting with five news professionals interviewing a subject could produce three separate stories with different facts in just one week, and it was not our sole source.  The correction itself doesn't note that the Sunday story containing Mr. Christie's actual words mentioned no date at all, and that the correction itself is not accurate in that it references a date in the original story instead of dates.

There is only one group of folks, pictured to the right, who can tell us for sure what the story here is.  In the larger version of this picture on the Daily Record site you can see four Daily Record news pros actively taking notes, another listening attentively to Mr. Christie, and there appears to be a tape recorder in the room.  With that many people taking notes and a possible record of the meeting, this should be easy to clarify.

All the Daily Record has to do is publish a verbatim transcript of the meeting.  Editorial Boards are on the record, and Mr. Christie knew going in that anything he said could be made public.  There is no source protection here, and no first amendment issue.  The only news policy that may be at hand is that newspapers shouldn't allow outside sources to tell them what to publish.

Another way to clear this up is for Mr. Christie to issue a statement to Blue Jersey saying that he never told the December/January story at the Daily Record Executive Board meeting.  Blue Jersey requested such a statement from Mr. Drewniak, but he has without explanation resisted doing so.

If the Daily Record is not willing to release the full record of the Editorial Board, and Chris Christie is not willing to issue a statement on what happened we are left with a mishmash of confusing stories that cannot be cleared up.  The reluctance to provide the meeting record by the newspaper or a denial by the subject raises suspicions that there may be some backscratching going on.  After all, here is how the interview ended according to the Sunday partial transcript.

Q: This is the part of this process where you get a chance to speak to the New York area baseball fans. You can tell them propaganda. Tell them something.

A: Listen, I'm a season ticket holding, unabashed Met fan. When you're a Met fan, you understand pain and disappointment. And life is full of pain and disappointment. You're prepared. If you're a Yankee fan, you've known nothing but joy. I own season tickets with my brother and I'm over there (Shea Stadium) a lot.

Q; Do you know the difference between a Shea Stadium hot dog and a Yankee Stadium frank?

A: No.

Q: You can get a Yankee Stadium frank in October.

A: See, this is why Met fans hate Yankee fans.

Because of the massive confusion around this story we must reluctantly give Mr. Drewniak a retraction of our claim that we caught Chris Christie in a lie.  But we are not willing to say that Chris Christie didn't lie, because we don't know that as a fact.  At this point we just don't know anything for certain.  We simply have no idea what the heck went on in that room, and what story Mr. Christie told the Daily Record.

We don't know, because they won't tell us.

Call for Letters to the Editor: Chris Christie's Lie

by: huntsu

Thu Aug 09, 2007 at 03:38:45 PM EDT

Yet for some reason not one blog (besides BJ) or newspaper has reported this.  So we're asking you, the great Blue Jersey activist crowd, to write to the newspapers that reported the different stories and note the contradiction.

• Star Ledger: eletters@starledger.com
• NY Times: letters@nytimes.com
• Washington Post: letters@washpost.com
• Daily Record: Web Form

The Star Ledger, Washington Post and New York Times all reported that Christie learned that he had been on the list to be fired but had been removed in March during a single phone call.  Tom Moran in the Star Ledger included details that Christie was by a pool with his family on vacation in Florida when he was e-mailed to call in, and went inside the room to make the call.  His reaction in March was "completely stunned" (NYT - 5/18), "completely shocked" (WaPo - 5/17), and "speechless" (SL - 5/18).

But in a recent Daily Record editorial board, and we have confirmed this with someone who was in the room, Chris Christie told a completely different story.  According to this version, Christie was told on the phone in December 2006 that he was on the list and it wasn't until January 2007 he learned on another call that he was off the list.

This is not a case of someone being confused, or misremembering a few facts about something that happened a long time ago.  Every specific of the story -- how he found out, when he found out, how many calls it took, what state he was in -- is different in the two versions.

This is a case of a US Attorney lying at least once, and maybe twice since we can't rule out that neither story is the truth.  Given that the whole US Attorney firing scandal has been driven by lies and misdirection, having another player in the scandal lying to the public and media is a big deal.

So we're asking you to write just a couple paragraphs -- no more than 200 words -- noting that Christie lied and that he did so on the record.  Send them to the papers that were told the different stories, and let's hope they get in.

Good luck!

The Super Double-Secret Debate Tape Flapperoo

by: DBK

Tue Oct 31, 2006 at 10:48:46 AM EST

Jeering at the Daily Record

by: DBK

Mon Oct 30, 2006 at 08:58:31 AM EST

JEER: To the failure of last night's debate between Rep. Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, R-Harding, and his Democratic opponent, Tom Wyka, to be taped for cable television. The league and both parties should have figured out a way to get that down. The candidates disagree sharply on arguably the biggest issue in the country: the war in Iraq.