“For what it’s worth, I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass,” Mr. Kushner wrote in an email to David Wildstein, the Port Authority official and Bridgegate mastermind, who now faces up to 27 months in prison.

Mr. Kushner was writing to him soon after Mr. Wildstein had resigned from the Port Authority in the mushrooming scandal. Mr. Kushner was consoling Mr. Wildstein, his former executive vice president at the Kushner-owned Observer Media Group, which he had left to take a political job at the Port Authority.

(As it turned out, Mr. Kushner himself seems adept at the politics of revenge. He helped force the governor out of the transition job; Mr. Christie had sent Mr. Kushner’s father to prison while he was the United States attorney in New Jersey.)

Mr. Trump had nothing to do with Bridgegate. And yet in later choosing Mr. Christie as his transition chairman, Mr. Trump empowered the governor to bring on similar people. After all, for his own team, the governor had hired Mr. Wildstein, who spied on enemies at the Port Authority. Mr. Christie’s administration also maintained naughty and nice lists of local mayors. Bridgegate culture is about winning, and giving second and third chances only to the most powerful, while underlings lose their jobs, or worse.

One of those pushed aside was the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, who wrote the infamous “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email that set the scheme in motion. Federal prosecutors said at trial that she neither conceived the plot nor had the sole authority to sign off on it. Near penniless, she faces 18 months in federal prison.

One of the survivors was Ms. Kelly’s former boss, Bill Stepien, who managed Mr. Christie’s two successful campaigns for governor before Mr. Christie fired him as Bridgegate erupted. He is now the White House political director. Trial testimony showed that Mr. Stepien knew about the lane closings before they took place and even asked one conspirator about “the cover” for the havoc.