‘It is about public officials on six figure salaries using their powers to affect the life of one person and then affecting the lives of thousands of people,” says reporter Matt Katz.
The Peabody Award-winning journalist is talking about the September 2013, closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge by employees or appointees of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The alleged aim was to punish Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich after he declined to endorse the governor for re-election.
The closing created days of traffic jams that jeopardized the wellbeing of thousands of New Jersey citizens trying to get their children to school and get to their jobs. It also impeded passage for thousands of American citizens attempting to cross the nation’s busiest bridge.
Katz’s response is as quick as it is informed. In addition to following Christie for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the 38-year-old writer is the eyes, ears, and voice of WNYC’s Christie Tracker. He is also the author of “American Governor: Chris Christie’s Bridge to Redemption,” a 452-page book that chronicles Christie from his birth in Newark to his fast lane rise to political celebrity to his own current political lane closing.
With the federal government trials of the three known players — Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials David Wildstein (who pleaded guilty) and Bill Baroni (pleading innocent) and ex-Christie chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly (pleading not guilty)— set to start on Sept. 12, Katz’s detailed and fast-paced book is the perfect pre-trial primer to put the action and players in context.
Think of it as a real life “Who Done It?” that will be solved live in real time beginning in September.
“(Bridgegate) goes to the way the system has elements that allow corruption,” says Katz, on a speaker phone as he drives to a book appearance.
Katz says while the trial will answer basic questions of who knew what and when, it also promises to be a bridge into other questionable activities related to Christie’s office and the governor’s Port Authority appointees. One such activity involves the governor’s staff getting local endorsements for Christie’s re-election.
“They were doing that on taxpayers’ time and presenting gifts to (other elected) officials,” he says, mentioning steel burnt after the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, and American flags flow over what became to be called Ground Zero. It was, he says, “the politicalization of 9-11.”
Katz also alludes to a central problem with the current administration. “Transparency has been a major problem; he promised to be transparent. It was in the second sentence in his inaugural address. And you look at the court cost related to secret documents and attempts to open them up to the public.”
Another problem with transparency, says Katz, is that formerly public documents are no longer treated as such. That includes records of the governor leaving the state, the amount the state government spent on Christie’s failed presidential bid, and other budgetary information. “We’re in court right now to see his G100 list — where the governor’s office listed its favorite towns.” That includes municipalities and “swing towns” that would receive special attention, like town hall meetings, to get endorsements.
“It has been very difficult to know what is going on in (Christie’s) government unless he chooses to tell us,” says Katz. And after the revelation of Bridgegate, the governor cut back on press conferences, making it more difficult to get information, he adds.
And then there is the controlled information coming from the governor’s office, which doubled his communications staff and, as Katz notes in the book, is “reaching a payroll of about $1.4 million a year — so staffers could be dispatched to every public event armed with video cameras, boom mic, and laptops, cutting and clipping Christie’s appearances into mini-movies.”
With the help of a digital director who, Katz writes, choreographed the governor, the team created videos edited from town hall meetings where the governor bounded into the room, threw off his jacket, told stories about his mother and friends, and sparred with anyone who challenged him.
“The YouTube videos were creating his own news channel,” says Katz, adding the governor’s staff sent tapes to a press list of 3,000 sympathetic and conservative talk shows. The videos attracted news show producers who invited the governor to appear — with those appearances edited by the governor’s staff to create more “YouTube moments,” says Katz.
The result, says Katz, was Christie became more than “a governor. He was ‘the Governor,’” and “the aura from New Jersey was beginning to seep into America” — and into the biography’s title.
Assessing Christie’s early years, Katz says “he was successful in the first term working with Democrats with pension and benefit reform. You can agree and disagree with it, but it was bipartisan success. The psychological effect he had on the state after (Super Storm) Sandy was important those first few days after Sandy hit, and I think he was good at it. There’s no question he did a lot less as governor in the second term than he did the first term. In regards to the pension he would have made more cuts, but the Democrats and unions wouldn’t go along. He couldn’t go any further. He didn’t make any deals or compromises.”
Katz later moves on to important issues. “What gets me hot under the collar is when the law is broken, and we can’t get documents we need to get.” He is also concerned about the public’s right to know what elected officials are doing and being held accountable and the current state of journalism.
“The press corps at the Statehouse has gotten smaller. It’s bad for democracy and bad for New Jersey for sure.”
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