Olivia Nuzzi (@OliviaNuzzi) is a political writer based in New York.

This being a story about New Jersey, it begins, of course, in a diner. Assemblyman John Wisniewski is just finishing up breakfast at the Sunnyside on Main Street in his hometown of Sayreville. Sitting with him this late January morning are a member of his staff and the mayor of another town in his legislative district. Wisniewski appears patient and thoughtful as he talks with the mayor about a possible development deal—but his fingers, nervously tapping on the table, give him away. The assemblyman clearly has something bigger on his mind.

Wisniewski is the reason the world knows about the political disaster that is Bridgegate. As chair of the state assembly’s transportation committee, he was the one who unearthed the smoking gun email from Governor Chris Christie’s fired Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Kelly—“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee”—to Christie’s Port Authority appointee David Wildstein. It was a discovery that would turn lives upside down, Wisniewski’s among them. The formerly obscure state lawmaker has made Christie seem scattered and frantic, and as the scandal continues to unfold, it threatens to knock the once seemingly invincible governor out of contention in the 2016 presidential race, or worse.


To hear Wisniewski tell it, no one was more surprised by the revelations in those documents than Wisniewski himself. When he first started looking into the lane closures, he tells me, he figured this was just another example of disorganization at the Port Authority, which manages the George Washington Bridge. “But then, when you start digging into it,” he says, “that’s when you start asking questions, because it made no sense.”

Chief among the things that continue to make no sense to Wisniewski is Governor Christie’s version of events—particularly Christie’s claim that he didn’t learn about his staff’s involvement in the lane closures until Jan. 8, the day before his now-famous press conference.

Wisniewski points to the fact that key Christie staff members had been forwarded emails from Wildstein and Bill Baroni, another Port Authority appointee, as early as Sept. 12. One of those emails was from Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, an appointee of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, indirectly accusing Wildstein and Baroni of breaking state and federal laws. Are we supposed to believe, Wisniewski asks, that Christie’s staff left him in the dark about all this? In the middle of a re-election campaign?

“Part of their job is to make sure the governor knows what’s going on,” Wisniewski says. “I find it hard to believe his senior staff was told ‘Two of your key appointees are being accused of breaking laws’ and nobody went to him and said, at least, ‘We’ve got a big problem in Fort Lee. Somebody closed lanes on the bridge and they’re accusing people of breaking the law. You ought to be aware of it in case you get asked.’ It seems like that at a minimum had to have happened.”

“I’m not saying that he ordered the lane closures—we don’t have any proof of that,” Wisniewski says. “I’m not saying he knew of the effort to cover it up. But I do believe that he knew something about this before January 8th.”

***

After breakfast, Wisniewski, tall and thin with gray hair and large blue eyes, drives his black Infiniti a short distance to the offices of his law firm, which is located in a typical suburban house. “I just want to make sure everyone is working,” he says as we arrived at Wisniewski and Associates, the practice he continues to run while serving in the Assembly.

The wall outside his office is lined with pictures of Wisniewski posing with other Democrats, including one photo with Hillary Clinton that, judging by her hairstyle, must have been taken sometime in the ‘90s. His communications director, Tim O’Donovan, tells me that Wisniewski now sometimes does remote TV interviews from the conference room down the hall, with a shiny, oak table and standing flags—both the American and New Jersey’s. “It’s been crazy,” O’Donovan tells me, referring to Wisniewski’s sudden surge in popularity with the media. He widens his eyes and shakes his head. “Crazy.”

It’s been crazy for nearly a month. Since the release of the Wildstein documents, Wisniewski has been an almost daily fixture on TV. He’s been in D.C. for Meet the Press and Face the Nation, and in New York for MSNBC. National reporters refer to him by his nickname, “Wiz,” and tweet his choice quotes like he’s a political celebrity. Which, for now, he pretty much is. It’s a far cry from the days when he was lucky to get on the fuzzy-pictured NJTV every now and then.

After a quick visit at the law firm, Wisniewski gets back behind the wheel for the hour-long trip to Trenton, where voting is to take place to create a joint Assembly and Senate committee to investigate the lane closures. (Separate committees already exist; the vote today will join them.) As Wisniewski snakes through the streets of his hometown, he tells me about his political beginnings, managing his father’s campaigns for mayor and town council in Sayreville. He recalls attending the 1976 Democratic Convention, where Warren Beatty saved Wisniewski’s mother from being kicked off the convention floor for not having proper credentials. “He put his arm around her and said [to the guards], ‘You’re not going to kick my mother out, are you?’” Wisniewski says. “And so she got to stay.”

In 1984, Wiz headed off to law school at Seton Hall, a member of Chris Christie’s class. “I could only admit to having a dim recollection that he was a classmate,” he says. “I knew he was there and bumped into him probably once or twice. He might have had a class or two with me.”

While Christie was struggling to keep his head above water in county politics in 1996, Wisniewski entered the State Assembly. He was immediately assigned to the Transportation Committee. Over the last few years, he twice introduced legislation to reform the Port Authority, without success. He experienced first-hand the Port Authority’s consistent stonewall. From simple inquiries to formal Freedom Of Information Act requests, the Port Authority just ignored it all. But when it ignored Wisniewski’s FOIA requests about Christie’s scuttling of the ARC Tunnel project in 2010, the legislature finally granted the Transportation Committee subpoena power.

Here’s the thing: If the Port Authority had been at all cooperative with Wisniewski, Christie might still be the GOP frontrunner. Instead, when the earliest murmurs began circulating that there was more to the lane closures than met the eye, Wisniewski used his subpoena power to help Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg look into it. “I expected to find that this was some type of mismanagement, perhaps politically tainted judgment emanating from within the Port Authority,” he says. “I never expected to see a paper trail lead back into the governor’s office.”

Wisniewski received the subpoenaed documents just before Christmas Eve and snuck away from his family holiday celebrations to review them on his computer. When he first read the infamous Bridget Kelly email, he says, he was cautious. “It’s one of those things that you put down, and you come back to, and you look at it again. Because it just was, in one sense, so unexpected to actually see a written document that says, essentially, ‘Let’s create havoc in Fort Lee.’ It was not something that I expected to see. And then where it came from! It was a personal email account. It wasn’t a governmental email account. So you want to make sure, you know, maybe there’s someone else named Bridget Kelly?”

***

The halls of the State House are teeming with lawmakers who loathe Wisniewski. Off the record, they call him “arrogant” and “an asshole.” They pass along stories of him allegedly telling less senior legislators that they can’t sponsor a bill they drafted because they aren’t ready, then putting his own or someone else’s name on the legislation. But Wisniewski has been at this for nearly two decades, and while many of those around him in Trenton have risen and fallen or all-out imploded, the worst anyone can say about him is that he might be kind of a dick.

On the Assembly floor, Wiz listens impatiently as Republicans complain that the Bridgegate investigation is turning into a witch hunt. You can hear his sighs and feel his eye-rolls from 10 feet away. Then it’s his turn to respond, hunched over the microphone, sometimes tossing the mic down and sending a thunk through the high-ceilinged room. Republican concerns aside, the joint committee is formed.

For now, Bridgegate remains a confusing web. The new joint committee has subpoenaed 20 people but most have asked for an extension on the Feb. 3 deadline to turn over their documents—or, in Bridget Kelly’s case, they’ve pleaded the 5th. David Wildstein taunted Governor Christie with a vague threat that “evidence exists” that might put the final nail in his coffin. And Christie, in response, released a bizarre listicle that aimed to discredit him.

Christie is trying his best to move forward as Wisniewski continues to dig into the past. But even as the governor celebrated Howard Stern’s birthday this past weekend, watched the Super Bowl being played in his own state and confidently took questions on the radio during Monday’s “Ask the Governor?,” he could not mask what appeared to be a look of uncharacteristic terror.

It was an expression that said: What might Wisniewski uncover next?