Road Warrior: 10 years later, this is what I've learned from the mistakes of Bridgegate

It can be sobering to recognize how much time it takes sometimes to recognize you made a mistake, as in: “Oh, I thought that arrow pointed north, not south.”

For my part, I kicked myself for nearly seven years for not acting sooner in September 2013 when readers insisted that heavy traffic on the George Washington Bridge was far more serious than the routine non-news commuter heartbreak there. With some digging, my Road Warrior column finally got the Port Authority to remove the illicit cause of the trouble by the fifth morning of this disgraceful affair.

But I was a bit slow to act. I didn’t recognize the serious dangers of these emotionally draining four-hour setbacks — or the abuse of power they represented — until the third day of what later became known as the Bridgegate scandal.

Should we have reported faster?

What might have happened if I’d dug deeper sooner?

If the delays had lasted only a day or two, would there have been enough public sentiment to spur a legislative investigation? Without investigators brandishing subpoenas, would the breadth of the Bridgegate scandal have been uncovered? Without a scandal that conferred guilt on three of Gov. Chris Christie’s allies for faking a traffic study simply to embarrass the Fort Lee mayor, would his 2016 presidential campaign have continued to gain momentum?

And bear with me here: If that momentum had grown sufficiently, might it have denied Donald Trump the Republican nomination — and the presidency?

Yeah, I know: “Woulda-coulda-shoulda-maybe-if“ theories are fun, but life is grounded in facts that actually happen, not whimsical guesswork.

Bridgegate timeline: What happened in public and was said in private

Nevertheless, I stopped kicking myself in June 2020 when the U.S. Supreme Court explained to us what all this really meant from a constitutional perspective:

Yes, there was wrongdoing, but the behavior of defendants Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, as well as the prosecution’s chief witness, David Wildstein, didn’t rise to the level of a federal crime because it didn’t generate financial profit for them, the high court ruled. The fact that these three lied and used the financial resources of a government agency to advance their scheme was only a byproduct of their actions, not the motive, the ruling said.

Oh, what a relief! Apparently, it barely mattered whether the lanes were reopened on the second day of the tie-ups or on the fifth day, because there was nothing illegal about them — not federally, anyway. There was no need to kick myself for a (ahem) non-event.

So I let myself off the hook. If they did nothing wrong, I said to myself, my hesitation amounted to nothing. So why am I still seething?

From 2020: What's next for Bridgegate schemers after the SCOTUS decision?

Isn't the scandal still an outrage?

Shouldn’t a bright line be drawn when one of the nation’s biggest government agencies — a bistate goliath — is used for nothing more than petty, political retaliation against a mayor who simply declined to endorse the governor’s reelection campaign?

“The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan. “But the federal fraud statutes do not criminalize all such conduct.”

Maybe they should — if only to set an example.

“At the very least, Kelly could have been prosecuted for tampering with evidence,” said attorney John Wisniewski, the former state assemblyman and co-leader of the Assembly-Senate committee that investigated Bridgegate. “She’s the one who asked her assistant to delete her emails.”

Legal aftermath: NJ reimburses Bridget Anne Kelly's attorneys $7.25 million for Bridgegate legal fees

Thankfully, perhaps the most damning evidence — Kelly’s email: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” — survived. Kagan’s opinion described it as “admirably concise.”

As for Baroni: “He lied to a legislative committee when he told us the lane closures were part of a traffic study,” said Wisniewski. “The Mercer County prosecutor could have preferred charges.”

But “could have” doesn’t cut it.

At the time, the public had an appetite for much more than charges of perjury, evidence tampering and blocking traffic to an interstate highway. Many wanted Christie’s political scalp, mainly because Kelly was tied closely to the governor as his assistant chief of staff, as was Baroni, his top appointee on the Port Authority.

But here’s the rub: Which criminal justice forum would be appropriate to take on the thorny task of investigating a governor and his top staff — especially when the governor previously was a respected U.S. attorney whose staff successfully prosecuted crooked politicians? After all, it’s the governor who appoints all the county prosecutors and the state attorney general.

Why not change the state constitution to allow New Jersey voters to elect the attorney general, as is done in New York?

“It’s not a perfect fix,” Wisniewski conceded, “but it might be a more enlightened method than what we have now.”

Mike Kelly: Bridgegate was wrong, but not a crime. How do we hold people accountable in the future? | Kelly

North Jersey's commuters: The real victims of Bridgegate

The law, like life, is hardly perfect. The complexities of the Bridgegate scandal make it hard to imagine a solution that completely avoids conflict of interest. Eventually, the feds took over. The prosecution was conducted by the U.S. Attorney's Office, which included staffers who worked for Christie when he held that post.

Deputy prosecutors under then-U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman used anti-corruption statutes related to property fraud to try Kelly and Baroni successfully in federal court in 2018. But in a similar case two years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that such laws were meant to cover only classic bribery and kickbacks.

“Much of government involves … regulatory choice,” Kagan wrote. “If U.S. attorneys could prosecute as property fraud every lie a state or local official tells in making such a decision, the result would be ... 'a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction.' In effect, the federal government could use the criminal law to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking. The property fraud statutes do not countenance that outcome.”

Maybe so. But Congress could strengthen the federal property fraud laws to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. For example, instead of relying solely on financial losses to establish whether property fraud was committed, the laws could be revised to emphasize the impact that four-hour waits impose on commuters when aides make regulatory changes simply to embarrass a constituent who defies their boss.

After all, the biggest losses incurred in the Bridgegate scandal weren’t borne by the bistate agency that runs the world’s busiest bridge. The real victims were commuters whose toll money back then bought them little more than misery.

John Cichowski is NorthJersey.com and The Record’s retired Road Warrior columnist. He can be reached at jwcichowski@optonline.net.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bridgegate: Mistakes can still teach us, Road Warrior says