Chris Christie took a parting shot at Bridgegate defendants. Was it necessary?

In the waning hours of the last work day of 2017, as most people were looking forward to a long weekend leading to the New Year’s holiday, the Christie administration was quietly burning a few final bridges in the Bridgegate scandal.

It was after 3 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 29. Deputies to the outgoing state attorney general, Christopher Porrino, filed a series of complaints in Superior Court in Trenton seeking to block Bridgegate’s three convicted felons — Bill Baroni, Bridget Anne Kelly and David Wildstein — from ever holding a government job of any kind in New Jersey.

A fourth complaint, also filed in Trenton that afternoon, sought to bar David Samson, a former state attorney general who was the Christie-appointed chairman of the Port Authority during the Bridgegate affair, from future state government employment.

Why the Christie administration took such a serious legal step on such an odd day and at such an odd hour — the last filing was at 5:23 p.m. — has sparked widespread speculation in recent weeks among legal and political experts.

Some have wondered whether this was nothing more than a final vengeful act by an angry governor, his approval ratings brought to historic lows by the bridge scandal and a failed White House bid, as he prepared to turn over power to a popular new governor, Phil Murphy.

A spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office, Peter Aseltine, said in an email that the filings were “standard complaints that we file when public officials or employees in New Jersey are convicted of crimes in federal court ‘involving or touching on’ their public office, position or employment.”

Aseltine pointed to a state statute that automatically disqualifies public officials from holding future government jobs if they are convicted of serious state crimes. When state workers are convicted in federal court, New Jersey prosecutors have the option of seeking a special court ruling to ban them from future public employment in state jobs.

Even so, legal experts, defense attorneys and former prosecutors were asking a version of a basic question: Was the Christie administration's last-minute move against Baroni, Kelly and Wildstein really necessary?

“Why would they bother?” asked Ronald K. Chen, co-dean of Rutgers Law School and a former New Jersey public advocate.

Chen suggested that the court filings could be interpreted as a “petty” final message by the Christie administration against the Bridgegate felons. “It’s making a point at their expense,” he said.

Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor and deputy chief of an organized crime strike force based in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark, called the filings a “real head-scratcher.”

“As a practical matter, is anybody going to hire Bridget Kelly or Bill Baroni for a state job again?” said Mintz, now a defense attorney specializing in white-collar crime.

Even Paul Fishman, the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Bridgegate investigation, wondered why the complaints were filed at such a late hour on the Friday before a holiday weekend.

Fishman said he was not consulted or even given a heads up about the filings — nor was anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark, a spokesman said.

“The question is why did the state make the motion when it did?” said Fishman, who left his post as New Jersey’s chief federal prosecutor last year and is now a visiting fellow at Seton Hall Law School.

“This was done while Chris Christie was still the governor. That's what's weird,” said Fishman, adding that the court filings might have been more politically palatable if they had been held over for the Murphy administration to act upon.

Christie did not make an announcement when the complaints were filed. Efforts to reach him through intermediaries in recent days as he took on a new job as a commentator at ABC News were unsuccessful.

A bookend to a tumultuous governorship

But the story of the court filings and the speculation about them touches on many of the most troubling elements of Christie’s tumultuous eight years as governor.

Many of those concerns, expressed by political and legal experts, center on Christie’s bullying personality and his tendency — widely documented on videos produced by his staff at taxpayer expense — to confront, undermine and often punish critics or perceived enemies, sometimes in meanspirited ways.

Each of the filings contains more than 100 pages of legal arguments and references to the Bridgegate episode, which began early on the morning of Sept. 9, 2013, the first day of school in Fort Lee. The plot was set in motion by a now-infamous email from Kelly, then Christie's deputy chief of staff, to Wildstein, a Port Authority official and a longtime political operative: "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

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Without warning to motorists, and just as the morning rush hour was building, Wildstein ordered Port Authority workers, under the guise of a traffic study, to cut off two of three local access lanes from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge, the world’s busiest span.

The impact was immediate, and devastating: massive, chaotic, bumper-to-bumper, horn-blowing gridlock backing up on Fort Lee’s narrow streets.

School buses were late delivering students to their first day of classes. Commuters trying to get to New York City and beyond never made it across the bridge. Police, fire and other emergency vehicles were immobilized.

Speculation quickly arose that the traffic jams were a political plot approved by Christie, a Republican, to punish Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, for his refusal to endorse the governor for re-election that fall.

The gridlock continued for four days. On the morning of the fifth, the traffic jams subsided as Port Authority workers re-instated all the access lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge.

But the episode left a bitter feeling in Fort Lee and beyond. It also sparked a federal investigation — and the convictions of four prominent players in the Christie administration.

None of those figures are now candidates for government jobs anywhere, friends and their attorneys say. And that raises the question of why the Christie administration would go to court to bar any of them from future public jobs at this time.

Bridgegate appeals continue

Samson, 78, once a prominent attorney and state political power broker, is retired and battling Parkinson’s disease. Unlike Wildstein, Baroni and Kelly, Samson was not directly linked to the plot to shut down access lanes at the George Washington Bridge. But Samson was hardly a bystander.

As protests against the traffic jams grew, Samson, in his role as Port Authority chairman, personally tried to stop agency officials from re-opening the lanes and easing the gridlock. It was never made clear why he took such a stance.

In July 2016, after a federal investigation into the Port Authority that grew out of the Bridgegate probe, Samson pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges, admitting that he threatened to hold up Port Authority approval of a United Airlines maintenance hanger at Newark Liberty International Airport unless the airline reinstated a money-losing flight to an airport near his second home in South Carolina.

In March 2017, Samson was sentenced to four years of probation and a year of confinement in his South Carolina home. He could not be reached for comment.

Like Samson, Wildstein, 56, the former director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority and the self-proclaimed architect of the Bridgegate plot, is not seen as a candidate for a government job anywhere.

Wildstein, who knew Christie when the two were students at Livingston High School, was barred from future government work as part of his guilty plea. He avoided prison by testifying at the trial that ended with guilty verdicts against Baroni and Kelly.

Baroni, the Port Authority’s deputy executive director during Bridgegate, was sentenced to 24 months in prison; Kelly received an 18-month term. Both are still free while they appeal the case. Wildstein now lives in Sarasota, Florida, and writes a blog about New Jersey politics.

Wildstein attacked Christie on Twitter after the filings on Dec. 29, writing, "Good job continuing to waste tax $$$." In a telephone interview from his home, Wildstein said he does not plan to fight the court filing at a hearing in Mercer County scheduled for March 22.

“I have no intention of contesting this,” Wildstein said.

As for Baroni and Kelly, the impact is far more complex.

Baroni, 46, who lives in Manhattan, and Kelly, 45, who lives in Ramsey, declined to comment. But friends say neither has been able to find any sort of job while they appeal their federal convictions. Oral arguments are likely to take place in the coming months in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with a decision possible by the end of the year.

If they lose their appeals and go to prison, U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton, who presided at the Bridgegate trial, also stipulated in her sentencing that Baroni and Kelly would be barred from government work for at least a year after they are released.

But on a practical level, experts say that Baroni and Kelly face an even more daunting path if they try to resurrect what many say were laudable government careers. With so much coverage of their roles in the Bridgegate scandal, the likelihood of either landing another government position is slim. Friends say even private employers have rejected them because of the torrent of negative publicity against them.

Kelly faces another problem. Unlike the complaints against Wildstein, Baroni and Samson, her filing contains an additional stipulation — to block her from collecting her state pension.

Kelly served 19 years in state jobs, first as a legislative aide to Assemblyman David Russo, R-Midland Park, before joining Christie’s staff in Trenton. She is divorced and supporting four children.

“This was a last-minute, petty shot from Chris Christie,” said one of Kelly’s friends who asked not to be named, citing fears of retribution from the governor and his allies.

A 'legal body blow'

Joseph Hayden, an attorney based in Hackensack who specializes in defending public officials in corruption trials, said the court filings were “mean-spirited” and a “legal body blow,” especially to Baroni and Kelly.

“For both of these people, after they pay their debt to society, they want to make a living,” Hayden said. “It’s almost inconsistent with everything we’ve heard about the re-entry of prisoners into society — about people after they pay their debt trying to make an honest living.”

Gerald Krovatin, a Newark-based lawyer who has defended several public officials in federal trials, called the court filings “overkill and unduly punitive,” and not part of what he understands to be normal procedure.

As an example, Krovatin pointed to one of his most celebrated cases — the federal extortion conviction in 2009 of state Sen. Joseph Coniglio, the Paramus Democrat. After Coniglio was handed a 20-month sentence in federal prison, Krovatin said state authorities did not go to court to block him from ever working in government again.

Porrino, Christie’s former attorney general who signed off on the complaints against the Bridgegate felons, did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2017, the state Attorney General’s Office went to court to block 10 former state workers who had been convicted of federal crimes from holding government jobs in New Jersey. Four of those filings targeted the Bridgegate felons.

Former Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said he did not find the court filings against the Bridgegate felons to be unusual.

“It’s not weird. It’s actually appropriate,” Molinelli said, though he added that state officials did not have to rush in with the end-of-the-year filings as the Christie administration was preparing to leave.

“Could they have waited until the end of the federal appeals for Bridgegate?” Molinelli said. “Yes.”

But Christie would have been out of office by then.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

Read the Christie administration’s complaint against Bridget Anne Kelly:”