Bridget Anne Kelly arrives for sentencing at federal court in Newark, N.J., on Wednesday. | AP Photo Two former Christie allies sentenced in Bridgegate scandal Bill Baroni gets two years for his role in the scandal; Bridget Anne Kelly gets 18 months.

NEWARK — Two former allies of Gov. Chris Christie were sentenced Wednesday to prison terms for their roles in the George Washington Bridge lane closures, a bizarre political stunt that was designed to help the governor’s career but ended up halting his rapid march toward the White House.

Bill Baroni, a former Republican state senator who served as Christie’s top appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was sentenced to a 24 months of incarceration. Bridget Anne Kelly, Baroni’s co-defendant and a former deputy chief of staff to Christie, was sentenced in the afternoon to 18 months in prison.


Both will also serve one year of probation, complete 500 hours of community service and pay fines and restitution, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Wigenton ruled. Baroni remained stoic as the judge read the sentence, and was smiling when he walked into the hallway. Kelly wipes away tears as she learned her future and dabbed her eyes with a tissue as she left the courtroom.

“What occurred in September 2013 was an outrageous abuse of power,” Wigenton told a packed court room. “The fact there was no financial gain underscores the significance of power to create chaos at the drop of a hat.”

She called it a “sad day for the state of New Jersey.”

The two were convicted in November after a dramatic, six-week trial in which David Wildstein, a dark political operative who admitted masterminding the scheme, testified against them in hopes of reducing his own yet-to-be-determined punishment. A jury found Kelly and Baroni guilty on multiple counts of conspiracy, fraud and civil rights violations.

All three attempted to implicate Christie when they took the witness stand last year, but the governor maintains he knew nothing about the plot, which was aimed at the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee who refused to endorse his 2013 re-election bid. The lane closures caused days if gridlock in Fort Lee, where the bridge is located.

Both Baroni, 45, and Kelly, 44, continue to maintain their own innocence and plan to appeal their convictions, saying they thought all along that the lane closures were part of a legitimate traffic study, not the act of political retribution the incident is now known to be.

Baroni, standing in a packed court room Wednesday, apologized for not stopping the plan and said he’d let everyone down — friends, family and the people he was supposed to be serving in his job at the bi-state agency.

“I failed,” said Baroni, wearing a dark suit and clutching his remarks in his hand. “I made the wrong choices, took the wrong guidance, listened to the wrong people.”

Bill Baroni arrives for sentencing at federal court in Newark, N.J., on Wednesday. | AP Photo

Both defendants faced as much as 20 years in prison under the most serious counts for which they were convicted. Sentencing guidelines call for much shorter terms, and prosecutors initially recommended in a pre-sentencing memorandum that each receive a sentence at the bottom or below a 37- to 46-month range.

Prosecutors said in court and in their brief earlier in the week that Baroni and Kelly committed serious crimes — “a stunningly brazen and vindictive abuse of power,” they wrote in the memo — and should each receive a “meaningful prison sentence.”

“Those are the actions out of the playbook of some dictator in a banana republic,” assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Cortes said in court. “It is incomprehensible that such actions could take place here in the United States.”

Defense attorneys for Baroni and Kelly argued for probation, given the service both have provided to their communities, as well as the lack of prior criminal histories. Baroni, his attorneys noted, has become a notable figure in the gay-rights movement, overcame obesity and was an informant for the FBI.

And Kelly, her lawyer said, is a single mother of four who’s engaged in civic and charitable work and remains deeply tied to her community. She’s “no monster,” her lawyes wrote in their memo.

Baroni’s attorneys said the sentence recommended by prosecutors exceeds the 21 months to 27 months Wildstein is facing despite admitting the lane closures were his idea. They also argued the guidelines call for a longer sentence than those handed out in several other cases that involved violent or sexual crimes, saying a particular guideline involving civil rights cases was more often applied in far different cases.

“Most of the prosecutions and convictions under” this guideline “involved criminal acts of violence committed by law enforcement officers,” one of his attorneys, Stephen Orlofsky, said in court.

While Wigenton found that guideline does in fact apply, prosecutors said some of what the defense attorneys argued were valid points and they suggested a shorter prison term of 24 months to 30 months.

This decision comes just weeks after David Samson, a longtime friend and mentor to Christie, was sentenced in a separate corruption case spawned out the investigation into the lane closures.

Despite admitting he shook down United Airlines so he could more easily reach his South Carolina estate, the former Port Authority chairman was sentenced to spend a year confined to that very same house, known as “Rest Period.” Samson, 77, also a former state attorney general, avoided any prison time and was given four years’ probation, 3,600 hours of community service and a $100,000 fine.

Samson’s terms are sure to draw comparisons this week to the sentences given to Baroni and Kelly, neither of whom were accused of doing anything for their own personal benefit.

The story of their undoing is one that captivated the political world from the moment it was revealed in early 2014, months after Christie won his re-election bid and just his presidential ambitions were being given serious attention.

That all evaporate when reporters were leaked a series of emails and text messages that revealed for the first time that the lane closures were part of a political revenge scheme. One message, sent by Kelly to Wildstein, came to symbolize the whole affair: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

The two were accused of closing lanes to the bridge in an effort to punish Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of the borough, after he refused to back Christie’s re-election.

The plan caused days of gridlock near the bridge as the mayor’s pleas for help were repeatedly ignored — at the Port Authority, where Baroni was deputy executive director, and in Trenton, where Kelly was in charge of intergovernmental affairs.

The trial also included testimony from some of Christie’s closest aides and advisers. There were numerous revelations about how the governor’s office was used, from the earliest days of his first term, to advance the governor’s political interests.

Christie was a fixture at the trial, mentioned at every turn. There were claims the governor not only knew about the lane closures but approved the plan, believing it to be the traffic study Kelly and Baroni had spoken about.

Numerous witnesses — including several who are still in his good graces and were never accused of any wrongdoing —said Christie was told of the lane closures long before he said he was. There was also the assertion that Christie’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, now a top aide to President Donald Trump, was aware of Wildstein’s plans.

The governor, who appeared with the president at the White House on Wednesday for a discussion about opioid addiction, has said none of that is true.

Asked about the sentencing by "Today Show" host Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning, Christie declined to comment on whether he thought the two deserve jail time.

“The judge will do what the judge believes is appropriate, Matt, and it's not my role or anybody else's role other than the judge in that courtroom who has passed sentence on people who have committed crimes,” Christie said from the White House lawn.

— Katherine Landergan and Katie Jennings contributed to this report.

