Court Testimony:’Christie Knew of Lane Closures’ but Denied it
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| “Christie was fuming” word had leaked out and he wanted to know who did |
It was early December 2013, and Gov. Chris Christie was fuming.
The Republican governor was set to hold a high-profile press conference to announce the resignation of his top appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He had summoned his senior staff to a 10 a.m. meeting in his office.
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With the scandal surrounding the George Washington Bridge lane closures continuing to grow, Christie wore his emotions on his sleeve, according to Deborah Gramiccioni, who was about to be named the new deputy executive director of the Port Authority, which operates the bridge.
“During this meeting with the governor and senior staff, the governor was incredibly angry and let us know how angry he was,” Gramiccioni, who was then a deputy chief of staff to Christie, testified in federal court on Monday. “In a thunderous tone, [he] told us how disappointed he was that he had just won a landslide victory and was now dealing with a number of things, one of them being the lane closure.”
Christie wanted to know if the staffers had any emails — any information — about the lane closures. He gave a deadline: Staff had one hour to tell either of his two highest ranking staffers, Counsel Charles McKenna or Chief of Staff Kevin O’Dowd, what they knew, according to Gramiccioni.
Gramiccioni, sitting in U.S. District Court this morning, said she had already told McKenna and O’Dowd that she heard Bridget Anne Kelly, another deputy chief of staff to Christie and now a defendant in the Bridgegate case, was on emails involving the lane closures. She said she also told Christie that a day earlier. And Gramiccioni said that Bill Baroni, the man she was about to replace at the Port who is now also a defendant in the case, was the one who told her.
Baroni and Kelly were indicted last May on charges of conspiracy, fraud and civil rights violations. They are accused of closing local access lanes to the bridge — the world’s busiest — to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing the Republican governor in his 2013 re-election bid.
Gramiccioni testified that after the meeting with the governor, she continued to prepare for the press conference, but at several points saw into Kelly’s office. O’Dowd was hovering over Kelly’s shoulder, looking at her computer screen. She said she also “believed” she saw Bill Stepien, the governor’s campaign manager, standing in the corner.
Christie held his press conference, and of course was asked about the lane closures and whether he could “say with certainty” that no one on his staff had been involved. Christie said he could.
Later in the day, before leaving the statehouse, Gramiccioni said she saw Kelly in her office. Kelly looked like she’d been crying, so she went to talk to her.
“She said that she had been looking at her computer through her emails all morning and she didn’t know if she had any emails regarding the lane closures,” Gramiccioni said. “I didn’t understand that.”
Kelly said she would routinely delete emails because she had a contentious relationship with her ex-husband and didn’t want her children to find any emails between them, Gramiccioni recalled.
“I said, did you have anything to do with this?” Gramiccioni said. “And she adamantly denied having anything to do with the lane closures.”
Gramiccioni said she told Kelly, who she considered a friend, that she should come clean if she had anything to do with the incident.
A month later, after an email was released in which Kelly declared it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Christie fired Kelly.
The governor, currently a top adviser to Donald Trump, has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the incident.
David Wildstein, who was appointed by Christie to be the Port’s director of interstate capital projects, has testified that he and Baroni told the governor about the lane closures as they were occurring. Wildstein has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy counts and implicated the two other defendants.
Gramiccioni, a former assistant U.S. attorney who is currently executive director of the Center of the Administration of Criminal Law at the NYU Law School, was nominted this year by Christie for a Superior Court judgeship in Monmouth County. The nomination is still pending before the state Senate.
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