Democrat Phil Murphy campaigned as the bright, progressive alternative to the scandal-marred administration of his predecessor, Gov. Chris Christie.

But as he tried to contain his own full-blown scandal Monday, Murphy turned to Christie's "Bridgegate" playbook. And he's proven to be a worthy disciple.

Christie, for example, repeatedly deflected responsibility for the George Washington Bridge lane closing by arguing that he couldn't reasonably be expected to keep watch over a few rogue employees out of workforce of 65,000.

For his part, Murphy used the number 60,000 when explaining the hiring history of Al Alvarez, the former $140,000-a-year-chief of staff at the state Schools Development Authority who resigned on Oct. 2 after allegations that he sexually assaulted a campaign worker in 2017.

New Jersey state senators and the assembly announced Tuesday that they will investigate the issue.

"I knew that he was hired,'' Murphy said when asked if he had a role in hiring Alvarez, who performed outreach to Latino and Muslim communities during the campaign. "But I didn't push for it and wasn't necessarily informed. I was told after the fact."

Then Murphy, as Christie did before him, sought to quell the storm by hiring an outside law firm to investigate why Murphy's transition team and later top administration officials failed to respond to Katie Brennan's reports that Alvarez raped her inside her Jersey City apartment in April 2017.

At the time, Brennan was a campaign supporter. She would later become a volunteer and is now chief of staff for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency.

In November 2016, Murphy, by the way, slammed Christie's internal report as a "taxpayer-financed whitewash" and a shoddy "smokescreen" that soaked taxpayers for $8 million and gave Christie a public relations tool to claim exoneration. Murphy was reminded of that charge on Monday, but said he did not have any memory of it.

On Monday, Murphy suggested that unlike Christie, who hired a politically connected lawyer from Manhattan, he was turning to Peter J. Verniero, a former state Supreme Court justice and a Republican who got his start working for former Gov. Christie Whitman. In other words, no one can accuse Murphy of seeking cover from a Democratic partisan.

"Peter Verniero is a highly qualified lawyer. This will be no whitewash," Murphy said, not mentioning Verniero's own controversial history: his threatened impeachment over his oversight of the state police when he was attorney general during the racial profiling scandal of the late 1990s.

(Verniero is remembered for robotically replying "I don't recall" during a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the issue. The committee concluded that Verniero misled it about profiling during his 1999 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and in April 2001, the Senate passed a resolution calling on him to resign.

The effort died in the Assembly, but in 2004, Verniero stepped down from the court,)

And, as in Bridgegate, there is the lingering question about Murphy: What did he know and when did he know it? Christie repeatedly said he learned about the George Washington bridge lane fiasco from news reports several weeks after they occurred in September 2013.

Christie came across as determinedly incurious about reports that top aides may have closed the bridge lanes to punish the Fort Lee mayor for refusing to back his reelection campaign. Documents would later show that Christie didn't seem all that moved to ferret out answers despite being bombarded with red flags.

Murphy also struck a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil posture, based on the limited public record so far. He said he didn't become aware of Brennan's allegation until Alvarez resigned on Oct. 2, when a reporter called for comment. And he first learned the details of the allegations in a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday.

Yet, four months earlier, Brennan sent an S.O.S. to Murphy and his wife, Tammy, seeking to discuss a "sensitive matter" related to the 2017 campaign. Murphy urged her to "hang in there" but then handed off the matter to a lawyer for his campaign.

Asked why he didn't probe any further, Murphy said he heeded advice of advisers not to give an audience to everyone who asks. He followed "processes."

"Tammy and I have been reminded time and again that to do one-off meetings with folks, good, bad or otherwise, creates an unevenness in the organization,'' he said. "And we have been reminded many times that we have professionals to do this for a living. You have processes that are in place. Stick to them."

Now that he realizes what Brennan wanted to tell them, Murphy said, "obviously I'm crushed."

More:Gov. Phil Murphy orders investigation into hiring of aide accused of sexual assault

Other questions that dogged Christie now will follow Murphy. Did his aides give Murphy the ability to publicly deny details of the incident with a straight face by simply not telling him? Murphy sidestepped the question, saying he doesn't indulge in "hypotheticals."

Murphy also said he eventually did confront top aides after the Journal story about not having been told of the details. But he refused to single them out for blame.

"We've turned this thing over a thousand times,'' he said. "You've got a confidentiality process. If you make an exception, you run the risk that somebody of my power and influence could put the finger on the scale."

Murphy is a new, unapologetic liberal governor who restored funding to women's clinics (cut by Christie) and signed a bill requiring equal pay for women workers. His wife, Tammy, lent her voice to the first wave of the #MeToo movement outrage, revealing how she was sexually assaulted as University of Virginia sophomore.

Yet this episode threatens to peel away the very progressive image that he has worked so assiduously and spent millions to develop.

He was positioning himself to help lead the 21st-century parade of Democratic Party reform, but now he's facing questions about his hiring of campaign cronies and whether he turned his eyes away from disqualifying blots on their résumés or closed his ears to unsettling rumors.

In just the past month, he's come under scrutiny for hiring Marcellus Jackson, an ex-Passaic councilman who was convicted of bribery in 2009. Jackson resigned after the Attorney General's Office determined that state law barred him from taking the government job.

During the campaign, Jackson worked for a company owned by Derrick Green, a campaign operative who was mired in a campaign finance scandal in Bermuda. Green landed a $140,000-a-year job in the secretary of state's office. No one is really sure what work he performs.

And now there are serious doubts about Murphy's handling of Alvarez. Murphy hired a lawyer to clear this up, he assured us Monday — just as Christie once did more than four years ago.