TRENTON — Mayors considered unfriendly to Gov. Chris Christie were treated less favorably than his allies by staffers inside his office, many of whom moonlighted on his re-election campaign, according to a trove of internal interviews released Monday.

A top liaison between Christie and local officials, Christina Renna, told attorneys reviewing the governor’s office in the wake of the George Washington Bridge scandal that her staff would receive "mandatory directives" to brush off calls.

She said she believed the former head of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs (IGA), Bill Stepien, Christie’s two-time campaign manager, masterminded the effort to keep track of mayors.

"Sometimes IGA staff received a directive along the lines of ‘no need to call to check in’ with a local elected official, which was enough to send a message to the local elected official," according to a summary of her interview with the attorneys.

Renna's comments, included in more than 400 pages of interview notes released Monday by the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, provided fresh evidence that the governor's office was keenly aware of whether it had support from mayors — including Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, whom Democrats contend was punished with the September toll-lane closings that spawned the scandal.

The law firm reported earlier this month that its taxpayer-funded internal review of Christie's office had cleared the governor and all of his current staffers of any wrongdoing.

The interviews provide more details about what happened behind the scenes in Christie’s campaign and administration as top officials kept close track of who was on the governor’s side when handing out favors — and, as the scandal gained momentum, how the governor cut ties with his allies as he began to understand its political implications.

Among other newly disclosed details:

• A close friend of Christie, Debra Wong Yang, who has vacationed with his family and was awarded a lucrative contract while he was U.S. attorney, was one of three attorneys who took part in his interview.

• Christie confronted David Samson, then-chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at a January meeting in Drumthwacket after the governor’s office was linked to the scandal. Samson denied involvement.

• The governor’s then-chief counsel, Charles McKenna, helped prepare the November testimony of Bill Baroni, then-deputy executive director at the Port Authority, who told the Legislature the closings were for a traffic study.

• The governor’s new chief counsel, Christopher Porrino, and his deputy, Paul Matey, tried to ferret out which state and federal charges U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman’s office was considering during a phone call with the office in January.

• A former Christie staffer and campaign worker, Matt Mowers, said Sokolich asked in 2012 whether the governor would write a letter of recommendation for his son, who was applying to Rutgers University. Mowers refused.

'AN EMBARRASSMENT'

The law firm did not record the interviews or keep transcripts. Instead, they were summarized by the attorneys and reflect their "mental thoughts and impressions" to ensure they were protected under attorney-client privilege, the firm said.

The review did not include interviews with Baroni; Samson; Stepien; Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff; and David Wildstein, a former top official with the Port Authority.

Christie fired Kelly in January when an email from her to Wildstein surfaced stating, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." He cut ties with Stepien because he said he could no longer trust his former campaign manager. Wildstein and Baroni were forced to resign last year.

State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), a co-chair of the legislative committee investigating the lane closings, said the interviews were "designed to shore up the whitewash," but fell short.

"This report should be an embarrassment to the authors and to the governor and the so-called ‘documents’ don’t change that one iota." Weinberg said.

NOT ALL BAD

Renna, who worked for Christie’s intergovernmental affairs office from 2010 until she resigned in February, said during her interview that "despite what may have happened during the re-election period in 2013, IGA is still 99% pure good government."

The Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher report, led by attorney Randy Mastro, recommended eliminating the office. In a statement Monday, Mastro said the panel learned of "aberrational behavior" from the office during the re-election "where staff were less responsive to certain local elected officials."

According to notes from her interview, Renna said Stepien, while working in the governor’s office, kept a "Top 100" list of towns, which he expanded to 117 after Hurricane Sandy. She said he posted maps on his wall with multicolored pins marking where the governor had held public events and town halls, and the municipalities with mayors who had signed on to support his initiatives.

She also said Kelly, who led the office after Stepien left, kept a list of names on her office wall, including labor officials, Democratic mayors and community leaders who were friendly to Christie.

After Christie launched his re-election bid, intergovernmental affairs staffers volunteered for "Bridgewater Wednesdays," a reference to campaign headquarters in Bridgewater, after work to make get-out-the-vote calls. Several staffers said they were told not to work on the campaign during business hours.

But Richard Rebisz, the office’s regional director for Hurricane Sandy issues, recalled in his interview getting a phone call from Renna shortly after it became clear that Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer would not endorse Christie for re-election.

"Renna told him not to bend over backwards for Mayor Zimmer, which Rebisz explained meant that he should not go out of his way to help her, and that Mayor Zimmer wasn’t going to endorse the Governor," according to notes from the interview.

Zimmer claimed earlier this year that Hoboken was starved of Hurricane Sandy relief money because she refused to sign off on a high-profile development project favored by Christie. The Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher report strongly disputed the claim.

Rebisz also recalled Kelly saying that she had to check with "Bridgewater," as in the campaign headquarters, before approving certain things.

Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Middlesex), a co-chair of the legislative committee, criticized the office’s operations, saying, "There doesn’t seem to have been a very clear dividing line between what was government and what was political."

CHRISTIE'S INTERVIEW

Interviews with Christie and others offered more detail about their relationships and how they responded to the scandal.

In a statement, Mastro defended Wong Yang’s involvement in Christie’s interview, saying only he posed the questions. "We had only one incentive here — to get to the truth," he said.

Notes from the interview said the governor "has no specific recollection of conversations" with Wildstein about the lane closings while at a 9/11 memorial event in New York City last year. Wildstein claims to have told the governor about them.

The governor, who called Wildstein an "odd duck," said in the notes that his hiring at the Port Authority was pushed by Baroni, who wanted to pay him $200,000. Christie said he later agreed at $150,000 salary.

Interviews revealed Mike DuHaime, Christie's political strategist, tried to persuade the governor not to cut ties with Stepien, and that Stepien lobbied DuHaime for Christie to tone down his criticism and reconsider. On Jan. 8, the day before Christie announced Kelly's firing and Stepien's ouster, he called a meeting at Drumthwacket where staffers discussed, among other things, which attorneys the pair should hire "to help them navigate the media onslaught."

"O’Dowd recalled that Walter Timpone and Kevin Marino were mentioned as potential lawyers," the interview memo said. Stepien retained Marino and Kelly hired Timpone, but later replaced him with Michael Critchley.

On Jan. 9, Porrino, the governor’s chief counsel, and Matey, his deputy chief counsel, discussed whether retaining outside counsel and conducting an internal review were necessary, according to Matey’s interview. They decided to hire an outside attorney after receiving an inquiry from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

"Porrino and Matey asked the assistant United States attorneys who called if they would share what, if any, federal or state statutes they believed could have been violated by facts known," the interview said. "(They) answered that they had no particular legal theory and did not want to confine themselves to a particular statute at that time."

The interviews also revealed that Michael Drewniak, the governor’s press secretary, said he was courted by Baroni to work for the Port Authority in 2012 and told the governor about the offer. Drewniak said the governor told him to wait and reassess at the end of the first term in office.

Star-Ledger staff writers Matt Friedman, Brent Johnson, Susan K. Livio, Salvador Rizzo, Ted Sherman, and Steve Strunsky contributed to this report.

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