From “Chris Christie: The Inside Story of His Rise to Power” by Bob Ingle and Michael Symons

Copyright © 2012 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Congress closely examined the U.S. attorney purge, starting in 2007, questioning

whether the offices were being used by the White House for political purposes. When word

surfaced that Christie was on a version of the hit list, even fiercely partisan Democrats such as

New York’s U.S. senator Charles Schumer were stunned. “It’s befuddling,” Schumer said at a

Capitol Hill news conference. “I was shocked when I saw Chris Christie’s name on the list last

night. It just shows a [Justice] department that has run amok.” Fellow federal prosecutors

shared the sentiment. “It’s astounding,” said Patrick Meehan, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia.

“Among his peers, Chris stands out as one of the most admired. If you were to create a list of

the U.S. attorneys who have had the greatest impact, Chris would be one of the top two or

three names I’d put on it. This defies explanation.”

Christie foes had an explanation for his removal, and it had to do with an investigation

of U.S. senator Robert Menendez.

The Democratic senator was well connected to Jersey’s political bosses, including by

extension the granddaddy of all of them, Frank “I Am the Law” Hague, who ruled out of Jersey

City from 1917 to 1947. In 1946, Hague backed William Musto for the state Assembly, where he

served nineteen years, followed by seventeen in the state Senate. Among the people Musto

mentored was Menendez. When Musto was indicted for racketeering, fraud, and extortion,

Menendez testified against his old friend, who was sent to prison for seven years in 1982. When

Menendez ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006, that testimony was presented as a young Menendez

doing the right thing by turning on Musto, though not all old-timers in politics agreed. The New

York Times quoted Menendez opponent Bob Haney as saying Menendez worked his way up

through the machine, then took over. Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran wrote, “Menendez is

the boss in Hudson County, which is ground zero for the state’s corruption problem.”

Menendez had done well in politics as Union City mayor and member of the New Jersey

Assembly and Senate and congressman— always pointing to his Cuban heritage and joining

South Florida residents in their hatred for all things Castro. He said his parents fled tyranny in

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Cuba. Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine tried to get the full story but wrote he couldn’t get a

straight answer. “Menendez was born on Jan. 1, 1954, exactly five years to the day before Fidel

Castro came to power. By timing of his birth, it’s possible they left Cuba during the regime of

Fulgencio Batista. One problem: Batista was a right-winger. You don’t make points with the

Cuban-American community by railing against right-wingers.” A July 2006 Star-Ledger story said

Menendez’s parents left under Batista, “seeking economic and political freedom.” Other bios

only said his parents were immigrants.

Many saw Menendez as a Hudson County political boss. Even though he was in

Congress, The New York Observer said Menendez used his “fierce and unforgiving muscle to

paralyze the government of Jersey City. And why? To teach a lesson to the mayor, a man named

Glenn Cunningham, who had run afoul of Mr. Menendez.” Later, Cunningham, a former cop and

Marine, took on the establishment in the Democratic primary for state Senate and beat old-time

pol Joe Doria and his colleagues endorsed by the Hudson County power brokers on the

Menendez team. Cunningham won the election, but five months after he was sworn in, died of a

heart attack. Jersey City shut down and four thousand people went to the funeral. It was made

clear to Menendez he shouldn’t be among them. Christie delivered the eulogy.

Jon Corzine appointed U.S. representative Menendez to finish the rest of his Senate

term—eleven-plus months— after Corzine became governor. Menendez then ran for a full term.

Two months before the Senate election between Menendez and Tom Kean Jr., son of Christie

mentor and former governor Tom Kean, Christie’s office launched an investigation of a nonprofit

organization that rented property from Menendez.

Menendez collected more than $300,000 in rent from the nonprofit and, while a

member of the U.S. House of Representatives, helped the agency for which he was landlord get

federal grants. Employees of the nonprofit, the North Hudson Community Action Corp.,

contributed $33,450 to Menendez campaigns. It also named him its “man of the year” in 2001

and named the lobby at its headquarters the “Congressman Robert Menendez Pavilion.” Its

lease stated the agency’s ability to pay rent was dependent on the agency getting certain

federal or state funding.

“I think it’s a conflict of interest for a congressman to do outside business with an

organization that receives so much federal money,” said Alex Knott, political editor for the

Center for Public Integrity. “The bottom line is that the congressman and his colleagues

indirectly control the purse strings of this organization.”

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Menendez said he had received permission to enter into the lease in 1994 from Mark

Davis of the House Ethics Committee. But a Capitol Hill publication said Davis didn’t work there

then and he couldn’t be questioned about it because he died the year before. A Menendez

spokesman said it must have been someone else who gave permission.

Bob Perry, the Texas tycoon who helped finance the “Swift Boat” ads against

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, funded a TV ad for the New Jersey Senate

race that showed a mobster in a black leather jacket talking on a cell phone in an alley. “We got

a problem . . .our boy down in Washington, Bob Menendez, he’s caught in this federal

investigation . . . right . . . feds start looking into these fixed contracts, badabing, we’re in but

deep.”

At a convention of Democrats in Atlantic City, Menendez accused Kean of working with

Christie. “Tom Kean Jr.’s entire playbook has been straight out of the Bush-Rove playbook and

now’s he’s even gotten the U.S. attorney involved.”

U.S. senator Frank Lautenberg, no friend of Christie’s then or as governor,

called the probe “quite a coincidence. The timing raises a question mark.” Corzine said it was

unfair to publicly reveal subpoenas sixty days before an election. Christie said sixty days had

been his office’s informal rule since before his arrival; the calendar showed the Menendez

subpoena dropped just a few days before that deadline. “Every year we have elections in New

Jersey. If I shut us down for a longer period, we’d be in the freezer half the year,” said Christie.

Lautenberg and Menendez didn’t like Christie, and when they announced their support

of the nomination of Paul Fishman to replace him as U.S. attorney in 2009, a slap in Christie’s

face was included. Menendez said the office should spend more time pursuing gangs, which

some took to mean less time chasing political crooks. Fishman immediately made a fool of

himself by saying he didn’t think New Jersey had a corruption problem and that referring to the

state in that way was demoralizing. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released in November 2009 showed

65 percent of state residents thought there was “a lot” of political corruption and 26 percent

thought there was “some.”

Fishman himself had a tangled history with public figures that on occasion affected his

role. As a private attorney, Fishman represented Corzine’s former girlfriend and union leader

Carla Katz and developer Encap Golf Holdings, both of which were investigated by Christie’s

office. The U.S. attorney in New York had to take over the Encap probe after Fishman recused

himself.

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The Star-Ledger reported that investigators were seeking union records connected with

Katz’s management of Communications Workers of America Local 1034. Quoting unnamed

sources, the paper said the authorities were focusing on an internal CWA probe that recently

accused Katz of misappropriating union money. Fishman transferred the Katz probe to the

federal prosecutor in Philadelphia, The Star-Ledger said. As of February 2012, no charges have

been filed against her.

Menendez won the 2006 Senate race, helped by a national wave of anger over the Iraq

War in extending a Democratic senate-winning streak that dated to 1976. Five years later, in an

October 5, 2011, letter to Menendez’s lawyer, the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of

Pennsylvania, Zane David Memeger, wrote, “After review and consideration of the matter

transferred to me, I have decided to close the file.”

It was transferred to him by Fishman, who in a procedure becoming rather familiar for

his tenure, recused himself again because Menendez had backed him for the office. The letter

was cosigned by assistant U.S. attorney Richard P. Barrett.

The Star-Ledger obtained a copy of the letter and said it indicated that Menendez’s

lawyer, Marc Elias, had pressed Memeger in phone calls for an update on the investigation. On

October 25, after weeks of silence, Menendez told Gannett’s Raju Chebium in Washington he

felt vindicated: “As I said almost five years ago, during the height of my first campaign for United

States Senate, there was no merit to this investigation and there never was. This official letter—

though long delayed— finally confirms this fact.”

When word emerged that Christie had been on, then gotten off, the Justice

Department hit list, his enemies contended he survived by going after Menendez and other

Democrats. “This spreads all over,” Lautenberg said. “It causes people to look under the hood.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem

quite plausible.”

Christie said nobody at the White House or Justice Department ever tried to get him to

start or stop a corruption investigation. “Never once,” he said. “I’ve never heard from the White

House that way ever. And I’ve never been called by the Justice Department to try to move me

one way or the other on a political corruption case. It’s just never happened. They don’t even

know what we’re up to in that area most of the time.”

The timing of the Menendez-related subpoena doesn’t line up right to support the

critics’ theory. Christie made the list twice; he got off the list the first time before looking into

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the Menendez landlord agreement, then got back on the list a second time after starting the

investigation. Christie bristles at the suggestion, stands by his actions, and says politicians and

the media often misstate the story.

“There’s lots of stuff that I can’t talk about, because of grand jury rules. So I’ve got to be

careful. But here’s what I’ll say about that: I don’t have one second thought about the decision

that we made to serve that grand jury subpoena on one entity sixty-five days before the

election,” Christie said.

Christie said the issue came to his office’s attention through a story in The Star-Ledger.

Ralph Marra, a registered Democrat who’d become a Christie loyalist, approached Christie with

the article in hand, as Christie recalls the exchange:

“We’ve got to serve a subpoena on this right now,” Marra said.

“Come on, it’s sixty-five days before the election,” Christie said. “I don’t wanna.”

“It won’t leak,” Marra responded. “It’s not like we’re serving Menendez. We’re serving

North Hudson Community Action Corp.”

“Ralph, I’m really reluctant. I’m really reluctant. You know, people are going to think

you’re trying to play in this,” Christie said.

“But you’re not. You need to think about this. I’m going to come back and talk to you

about it some more,” Marra replied.

“Later that day he came back with Jim Nobile, chief of special prosecutions, and the two

of them argued vigorously to me that because it was in the press that there was a real likelihood

that documents were going to be destroyed that might prove the theory of the case, and that

we needed to serve a subpoena immediately so that we would either prevent the destruction of

documents or create a case for obstruction of justice for destroying the documents,” Christie

said.

“And I still was kind of— I wasn’t committing, I was just sitting there listening, kind of

shaking my head no. And Ralph stood up and said to me, ‘If you don’t do this, you’re being

political. The only reason you wouldn’t do this is because you’re afraid of the way you’ll be

perceived. And if you don’t do this, you’re being political. You’re being just as political in the

opposite direction. How about just doing what’s right?’ ” Christie said. “And as Ralph often had

the ability to do, he talked me into it. Now, I don’t back away from the decision one bit. I think it

was the right decision.”

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Kean spent the rest of the campaign saying Menendez was under “federal criminal

investigation”— a phrase still being kicked around by Republicans in 2011, before the all-clear

letter was finally sent by prosecutors in Pennsylvania. Christie said he’s confident his office

didn’t leak word of the subpoena because doing so had the potential to undermine the

investigation.

“We had no incentive to leak it because we were trying to prevent destruction of

documents and destruction of evidence,” Christie said. “I think we proved over the years we

didn’t want things to get public. I often said that we operate best in secret. We operate best in

the dark, until we’re ready to turn the lights on.”

Doing that, however, opened him up to personal attack, giving his enemies ammunition

for years.

“I have no second thoughts about it. I knew what the risk was. But I never had a feeling

in my mind that that was inappropriate to do,” Christie said. “I knew the risk. And I had operated

really well in that job for four and a half years at that point by just figuring out what the right

thing to do was and doing it. If I started thinking, ‘Well, if it’s misperceived, it could hurt me and

it could hurt the office’— if I started making decisions on that basis, that’s kind of a slippery

slope and I don’t know where it stops.”

Christie’s defenders when the political accusations started flying included Walter

Timpone, the lawyer who’d nearly been named his top assistant at the U.S. attorney’s office

before his ill-timed visit to Senator Robert Torricelli doomed his prospects. “To attack Christie’s

integrity and infer that he is but a puppet of Rove belies six years of nonpartisan, effective

corruption prosecutions of high-level Republicans and Democrats alike. It also sullies the

reputation of an office that has always demanded and continues to demand the highest ethical

standards,” Timpone wrote in a letter to the editor of The Star-Ledger.

By 2009, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, the House

Judiciary Committee finally got to interview Rove and Miers, under oath but behind closed

doors, under a deal brokered by Barack Obama’s White House. Transcripts of Rove’s interviews

show he was asked about Christie and said he has no idea how New Jersey’s federal prosecutor

wound up on or off the list including whether the Menendez probe played a role. He conceded

the Menendez investigation and leak probably favored Republicans in the 2006 election. “I

would suspect so. Again, I don’t know enough about New Jersey politics and how widely it was

covered to make a comment,” Rove told the committee.

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While Rove told the House Judiciary Committee he never talked with Christie about his

duties as U.S. attorney, he did create headaches for Christie in the midst of the 2009 governor’s

race by acknowledging that they talked about the prospect that he would run for governor—

including once while Rove was still working at the White House, a job he left in August 2007, at a

time when Christie was supposedly the apolitical prosecutor.

“I talked to him twice in the last couple of years, perhaps one time while I was at the

White House and once or twice since I left the White House, but— not regarding his duties as

U.S. attorney, but regarding his interest in running for governor, and he asked me questions

about who— who were good people that knew about running for governor that he could talk

to,” Rove said. “. . . He may have said, I am really enjoying the job and, you know, I have got a

whole bunch of cases that I am prosecuting and, boy, maybe you have been reading about me.

But no; about the sum and substance of it, no.”

In October 2011 Senator Frank Lautenberg signed off on President Obama’s nomination

of U.S. magistrate Patty Shwartz— a former attorney under Christie— to the U.S. Third Circuit

Court of Appeals. But Menendez did not, although Shwartz got a strong rating from the

American Bar Association. It marked the first time a fellow Democrat had blocked one of

Obama’s judicial nominees.

Many in the legal community thought it was personal vendetta, since Shwartz, who

worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in Newark from 1989 to 2003, lives with Nobile, the head of

the special prosecutions unit that in 2006 began investigating the Menendez landlord

arrangement. At first Menendez refused to comment but when media speculation grew hot, he

issued a statement saying he would not have opposed a nominee because of a connection to

the U.S. attorney’s office. He said he was not fully satisfied with answers to his questions to her.

The Obama administration stuck by its nominee and Menendez finally consented after a second

interview with her.