Here's what Chris Christie leaves out of his book 'Let Me Finish'

Chris Christie is back with his new score-settling memoir, spinning his version of events from Trenton to the Trump White House and casting himself as the man who could have saved President Trump from chaos.

Like most political tell-alls, "Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics,'' is a self-serving, one-sided account that omits inconvenient facts and context.

Here are key details from the high points that help round out what Christie, New Jersey's former governor and onetime Republican presidential hopeful, left out.

Bridgegate revisionism

Not surprisingly, Christie reasserts his claim of being "exonerated" by three investigations into the George Washington Bridge lane closings, a bizarre political retribution plot that targeted the Fort Lee mayor for refusing to back Christie's reelection. The closings of Fort Lee's local access to the bridge led to massive traffic jams over five days in September 2013.

While it is true that probes yielded no proof of Christie's involvement, they also did not clear him. And they did not dispel the cloud of doubt that hangs over Christie's legacy.

The first report, conducted by New York lawyer Randy Mastro and commissioned by the Christie administration, did clear Christie in March 2014 of any involvement or prior knowledge in the scheme before it was hatched. It did so without interviewing three principal figures who might have had intimate knowledge of the scheme. Critics called the report an expensive "whitewash."

A bipartisan legislative investigative panel concluded after nine months without producing a smoking gun linking Christie. But it also noted that there was no "conclusive evidence" that Christie "was not aware" of the lane closures.

The panel also did not interview two officials, Christie's former Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly, who successfully rebuffed the panel's subpoena, and David Wildstein, the self-professed mastermind of the closing and a top Christie appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during the investigations.

The federal investigation and 2016 trial of Kelly and Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director at the Port Authority and Wildstein's supervisor, also did not yield any evidence of Christie's involvement. But Baroni and Wildstein (who served as the government's chief witness) testified that Christie was made aware of the chaos in Fort Lee as the lane closings were taking place, and Kelly testified that he was alerted a month before they happened.

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Christie also reasserts in the book that he was "blindsided" by the Jan. 8 bombshell report in The Record of Kelly's "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email to Wildstein, who quickly replied, "Got it."

Yet Christie omits crucial testimony from multiple officials in the trial who confirmed that they raised alarms a month earlier of possible involvement of Kelly, Baroni and Bill Stepien, Christie's former political adviser, who now works in a similar role for Trump.

Jared Kushner's long memory

Christie has repeatedly insisted over the past two years that his relationship with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, was amicable and friction-free, despite Christie's tangled history with the Kushner family.

Yet, as his book illustrates, Christie's claims of harmony proved to be nothing but spin. In the book, Christie portrays Jared as his revenge-fueled foe who sabotaged him at every turn. Jared, writes Christie, carried out a "hit job" on him.

According to the book, Kushner openly opposed Christie's appointment as Trump's transition chief during a meeting with Trump, Christie and then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in May 2016. At that meeting in Trump Tower, Kushner aired out the long-smoldering grievances he and his father, Charles, held against Christie.

The hatred dates back 2005, when Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, prosecuted the elder Kushner, a prominent New Jersey developer, on charges of tax evasion, campaign finance violations and trying to silence witnesses — his brother and sister — in a federal probe of his company's finances.

By his own admission, Charles Kushner recorded an encounter between a prostitute and his brother-in-law, William Schulder, at a Bridgewater hotel room and then sent photos of the tryst to Schulder and his wife, Kushner's sister, Esther. Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to the charges and served 14 months in federal prison.

"I retaliated against ... my own flesh and blood," Charles Kushner said at his 2005 sentencing. "What I did was wrong, and I say that in front of my own children."

Yet, despite the admission, Jared Kushner, who frequently flew to see his father in federal prison in Alabama, believed that the scandal was the result of overzealous overreach by Christie During the Trump Tower meeting, Kushner accused Christie of meddling in a family dispute and called him "vindictive and ambitious and untrustworthy,'' according to the book.

"He [Jared] implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn’t state one fact to back that up," Christie wrote. "Just a lot of feelings — very raw feelings that had been simmering for nearly a dozen years. Those feelings were now, finally, coming to a boil in front of the man who had brought all this heat on the Kushner family — me."

Despite the venting, Trump went ahead with the appointment despite Jared's objections. Yet, in one of the first stunning personnel moves, Trump dismissed Christie shortly after the election.

Steve Bannon, the chief strategist for the campaign, told Christie that Jared was responsible.

“The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon told Christie.

The Obama 'hug'

Christie has tried for years to dispel the notion that he hugged President Barack Obama when the president arrived in New Jersey to tour the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy in late October 2012.

Actually, photos of their tarmac meeting show a concerned, grim Obama shaking Christie's right hand as his left hand rests on Christie's shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

"I'm half Sicilian," Christie writes. "I know hugs. That was no hug."

Still, images got wrapped up in the deep, anti-Obama hatred that was stirred by the Tea Party activists in the GOP base. In the eyes of many on the right, Christie boosted Obama by allowing him to appear as an empathetic leader in the final stage of a tight reelection fight against Republican Mitt Romney. Many came to view Christie's warm greeting as an act of betrayal.

Christie further fueled conservative fury by heaping lavish praise on Obama during a round of television interviews. And he further inflamed the right during an interview on "Fox and Friends." When asked if he would invite Romney to tour the damaged areas, Christie bristled.

"If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me,'' he snapped.

In the new memoir, Christie defends his defense of Obama.

"What was I supposed to do? Wear a Romney button? Shake GOP pom-poms? I had no basis to insult the man [Obama]. He did everything I asked him to do,'' Christie wrote.

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The smartest guy in every room

One of the main takeaways of the book is Christie's supreme self-confidence, the belief that Trump might have avoided the chaos and incompetence if he had only kept Christie on the transition, possibly in a higher post of power.

Instead, Christie was dumped from the transition along with the binders his staff gathered. And in the vacuum, Trump relied on incompetent and corrupt "riff raff."

"I did everything I could to make sure my friend Donald reached the White House fully prepared to serve,'' Christie wrote. "But a handful of selfish individuals sidetracked our very best efforts. They set loose toxic forces that have made Trump's presidency less effective than it otherwise would have been."

This analysis overlooks several glaring factors. Christie's own rise to the presidency was undone by his own top associates.

And it also ignores the reality that has become the central deficiency with the Trump White House: Trump himself. His erratic, impulsive behavior turned the White House into a revolving door, with many joining believing that they could tame and manage Trump, only to leave disgusted and with their reputation in tatters.