Salvador Rizzo

@rizzoTK

New Jersey taxpayers have spent nearly $8.2 million on Governor Christie’s private attorneys handling the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal, according to invoices released by the state attorney general Thursday evening.

The latest batch of heavily redacted documents shows that the law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher billed the state $202,000 from September through March. The firm previously had billed $8 million since being hired in January 2014.

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That comes on top of $2.3 million the Christie administration has paid to a risk management firm, Stroz Friedberg, which was hired to dig up subpoenaed documents.

In total, billings from Christie’s legal team are now at $10.5 million and climbing.

Led by attorney Randy Mastro, Gibson Dunn produced a report clearing Christie of any wrongdoing in the lane-closure scandal that jammed Fort Lee with traffic for four mornings in September 2013.

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Federal prosecutors charged three of Christie’s former aides and associates – Bill Baroni, Bridget Anne Kelly and David Wildstein – with devising the traffic jam to punish Fort Lee’s mayor, and with concocting a cover story: that it was all a traffic study. Baroni and Wildstein were top officials at the Port Authority, which operates the bridge, and Kelly was Christie’s deputy chief of staff at the time.

The Mastro report, which was released before the indictments, has been criticized for several deficiencies.

One of the Gibson Dunn attorneys who interviewed Christie, Debra Wong Yang, is a personal friend of the governor’s from the time they were both U.S. attorneys under President George W. Bush. They vacationed together and Wong Yang’s daughter was an intern in Christie’s office. Wong Yang later hosted a fundraiser in California for Christie’s failed presidential campaign.

Gibson Dunn lawyers did not interview anyone at the Port Authority for their report, did not uncover any wrongdoing by Baroni, failed to search one of the email accounts Christie used at the time, and, according to experts, did not follow industry guidelines on how to conduct unbiased internal investigations.

ALSO: Judge on Christie GWB lawyers: Taxpayers deserve better

Christie and Mastro have defended the report as “comprehensive and exhaustive.” However, U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton, who is presiding over the criminal case against Baroni and Kelly, has blasted Gibson Dunn for overwriting their notes from more than 70 interviews.

“The taxpayers of the state of New Jersey paid GDC [Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher] millions of dollars to conduct a transparent and thorough investigation,” Wigenton wrote in a December opinion. “What they got instead was opacity and gamesmanship. They deserve better.”

Separately, New Jersey’s Democratic-controlled Legislature paid $1.2 million to another law firm, Jenner and Block, for a different investigation of the bridge scandal. And another $1.2 million has been spent by the Christie administration on legal expenses for more than a dozen state employees who were questioned by investigators or received subpoenas.

Salvador Rizzo: rizzo@northjersey.com