Each week, Blue Jersey Radio streams LIVE with Jersey's latest political buzz, interviews with newsmakers, and your stimulating calls Number: (646) 652-2773.
Our guest, Assemblyman John S. Wisneiwski represents Sayreville in the NJ Assembly. He's also chairman of the NJ State Democratic Committee and that's the hat he'll be wearing tonight. After all, who better to discuss the ongoing SchundlerGate (tm) story than the party's partisan-in-chief, John Wisniewski?
Jeff and I welcome your calls -- especially if your name is Bret Schundler --as we unravel the complicated layers of Governor Christie's colossal $400,000,000 school-funding hissy fit. So if you're in the mood to pile on, won't you join us? at (646) 652-2773.
So, tune in tonight and every Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. to laugh so hard you're friends will be jealous. Seriously. You won't want to miss an episode - and of course, you never have to. Listen to them all on Blogtalkradio, or download any show on iTunes.
We understand if you're left feeling a bit jilted which is why I'd love to invite you to come onto BlueJerseyRadio this Tuesday at 8pm. Consider this an open invitation to come to unburden yourself to an appreciative crowd. It's easy to be a guest, just call into the show (646) 652-2773 any time between 8-8:30pm this Tuesday.
Basically, we empathize with you. So if you're looking for a warm place to cultivate your hard-earned feelings of vengeance, just know this much: you'll always have a wide-open forum on Blue Jersey Radio.
Despite what some people may think, I believe I am somewhat careful about calling for someone's head. All things considered, we elect our leaders and we should deal with them. If we want to get rid of them, we have elections. It's imperfect, but it's the way our system works.
I called for Javier Inclan to resign or be fired because he testified in court that he had assisted David della Donna in committing numerous felonies. I went after John Shinnick because there is no way he puts in the hours to earn his pay (which is still true) and because I had information that he was violating the rights of people that worked for him. There has to be a reason for wanting someone to give up their position.
There's a reason for wanting Dick Codey to step down as President of the State Senate.
A scandal most foul is bubbling up like raw sewerage around House Republicans in Washington, and a whiff of the scandal is wafting around retiring Rep. Jim Saxton (R-NJ3).
House GOP officials acknowledged on Thursday that the longtime and trusted treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee may have skimmed as much as $1 million from the committee. From today's WaPo:
For at least four years, Christopher J. Ward, who is under investigation by the FBI, used wire transfers to funnel money out of the NRCC and into other political committees he controlled, then shifted the funds into his own personal accounts, the committee said.
According to the Federal Election Commission, Ward is treasurer of SAXPAC, Saxton's leadership PAC formed in 2005.
Last week we caught Chris Christie in a pretty blatant contradiction in stories he's told to reporters, so blatant that we feel comfortable calling it a lie. No one we've contacted -- reporters, editors, columnists, bloggers, my dog and hamster -- have been able to explain the completely different stories he told, and different reporters have verified that they repeated Christie's stories correctly.
Yet for some reason not one blog (besides BJ) or newspaper has reported this. So we're asking you, the great Blue Jersey activist crowd, to write to the newspapers that reported the different stories and note the contradiction.
The Star Ledger, Washington Post and New York Times all reported that Christie learned that he had been on the list to be fired but had been removed in March during a single phone call. Tom Moran in the Star Ledger included details that Christie was by a pool with his family on vacation in Florida when he was e-mailed to call in, and went inside the room to make the call. His reaction in March was "completely stunned" (NYT - 5/18), "completely shocked" (WaPo - 5/17), and "speechless" (SL - 5/18).
But in a recent Daily Record editorial board, and we have confirmed this with someone who was in the room, Chris Christie told a completely different story. According to this version, Christie was told on the phone in December 2006 that he was on the list and it wasn't until January 2007 he learned on another call that he was off the list.
This is not a case of someone being confused, or misremembering a few facts about something that happened a long time ago. Every specific of the story -- how he found out, when he found out, how many calls it took, what state he was in -- is different in the two versions.
This is a case of a US Attorney lying at least once, and maybe twice since we can't rule out that neither story is the truth. Given that the whole US Attorney firing scandal has been driven by lies and misdirection, having another player in the scandal lying to the public and media is a big deal.
So we're asking you to write just a couple paragraphs -- no more than 200 words -- noting that Christie lied and that he did so on the record. Send them to the papers that were told the different stories, and let's hope they get in.
Today in the Daily Record, US Attorney for the NJ District Chris "Christie said he was told in December that he was on the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, but in January was told his name had been taken off the list."
On May 18th, Star Ledger columnist Tom Moran (article behind firewall, but same timeline given in WaPo) quoted Christie with an entirely different timeline.
Chris Christie was in Florida watching his children splash around a pool two months ago when he received an urgent e-mail from a senior official at the Justice Department telling him to call.
It was from John Elston, a man he had known for years. Christie stepped into his hotel room, dialed Elston's number, and got the shock of his life.
Elston had a warning for him. The growing scandal over the firing of eight United States attorneys was about to come his way.
Christie, in fact, had only narrowly escaped being fired. His name was on one of the original kill lists. It was removed only a few weeks before the decisions were made final. This one was a close call.
Two months before May 18th would be the middle of March, about three months after he just told the Daily Record he learned of his place on the list. And how did he react in March?
"I was speechless," Christie says. "I just could not believe I was someone who was being actively considered for being fired. It makes you search yourself and ask: `Was I doing my job well?'"
Strange reaction if he'd known for a couple months that he was in the clear.
Chris Christie's Conflicting Stories
Tom Moran 5/28
Daily Record 8/3
What: Learned in the same phone call that he had been on the list of US Attorneys to be fired, but was now off the list. Also learned that it was about to become public.
What: Learned in first phone call that he was on the list of US Attorneys to be fired. Learned in second phone call the next month that he was off the list. No word on when it would become public.
When: Single day, March 2007
When:First call in December 2006, second call in January 2007
Where: On vacation with his family in Florida Christie received an e-mail by the pool to call DC, and then went into his room to take the call.
Where: All we can surmise is he was in New Jersey for both calls.
Reaction: "I was speechless," Christie says. "I just could not believe I was someone who was being actively considered for being fired."
Reaction: Did not provide any info.
The contradiction is not easy to parse, because he was quite clear about getting making the call in his Florida hotel room after getting an e-mail at the pool while playing with his kids. And he was speechless, not believing what he heard that he was on the list, but also safe -- all in one phone call!
But the story he told today was totally different. Now he is in New Jersey in December (there was no vacation or pool) when he heard he was on the list. He then had to wait an entire month until January 2007 -- after the scandal broke -- to learn that his job was safe.
Now, both these situations are pretty memorable. If I found out at the Christmas (Christie is Catholic) holidays that my job was in jeopardy, and then had to go through New Years thinking about getting fired it would stick in my head.
There's no way that this is a simple misconception or the famous Republican, "I can't recall." One of these stories is an outright lie.
Why is this important? For one, Christie is portraying himself as some sort of ethical crusader who is above reproach, the self-appointed scourge of corruption. He and his supporters are outraged when his integrity is questioned over the Menendez subpoena right in the heat of the campaign, or when he inserts himself in the middle of a State Supreme Court nomination, or when his bi-partisan record is not as robust as it seemed, or when he tapes highly political "news" pieces with political mentors.
And yet when he gets caught up in a national scandal related to his job, his boss (AG Gonzales) and his political benefactor (President Bush) he chooses to lie about it.
And that brings us to the bigger point, and more important one. The US Attorney scandal would have been a small ripple on a larger pond had the lies not piled up. Most folks in the media and on main street would have let it go since the President can fire or keep US Attorney at his pleasure.
But first the political appointees at Justice lied about why the prosecutors were fired, and the prosecutors fought back with facts and accusations of political interference in their jobs.
Then the politicians like Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) started lying about their roles in the firings.
Then the AG and his staff went in front of Congress and they started contradicting each other's sworn testimony, and people started resigning in disgrace.
The Congress continues to try to get straight answers and determine exactly what happened, but the White House claims executive privilege and then the staff who does testify either don't recall anything that happened two months ago or give conflicting accounts.
The entity charged with overseeing the executive branch is being bamboozled and confused and lied to in order to keep it from making a determination whether the law was broken. Whether intentional or not, whether illegal or not, it amounts to a major obstruction of justice.
And Christie is a part of the story. He was put on the list before he dropped a subpoena that affected the Menendez/Kean Jr. race, and then after the election was taken off the list. That's suspicious in and of itself.
And now Christie is lying, just like the rest of the Bush administration involved in this case, about when, how and where he found out that he was on and then on the list of US Attorneys to be fired. It was either all at once in Florida on vacation with the family in March, or it was over a month or more in New Jersey over the Christmas and New Years holiday.
Lies either serve a purpose, or they are an indication of an ethically challenged person. When there is no reason for a lie, nothing to gain from the lie, generally the person is just a liar.
So the media, and I think in particular Tom Moran who has written some almost hagiographic pieces about Christie and transcribed one of his stories quite dramatically, needs to find out what this is.
UPDATE: We got an e-mail suggesting that the reason for the change in story may be direction from on-high. They suggested, though I don't recall, that the AG said all US Attorneys were told in the fall of their status. Christie's comment that he didn't know until March would contradict that. Does anyone have a link to that claim by the AG?
Interesting story in today's papers (p 3 of the Star-Ledger) about UnitedHealth of Minnesota--the Board chairman is stepping down and the outfit is being investigated by the Feds because of back-dated stock options given to its executives.
This is the outfit that gave Junior money on the same day Senior was attending a Board meeting (Senior sits on the committee dealing with executive compensation).
Connect the dots...there's at least a news release here...
Personally, I don't like too many cops. They always come up to my car and treat me as if I am a terrorist loving communist. That's before they even find out that I really am a terrorist loving communist. Maybe its the car I drive.
And hey, maybe $4 million isn't much to this state's $30 billion coffer's and if they didn't have to pay it back, I would probably not care that we got some extra money from the Port Authority and the Federal Government (God knows we need it).
Every time a new campaign finance corruption scandal pops up in the Republican House there is Representative Mike Ferguson is there taking money from lobbyists and corrupt politicians. This time it is mortgage lender Freddie Mac lobbyist Mitchell Delk doing the influencing by illegally throwing 85 fundraisers that put $1.7 million in the pockets of members of the House Financial Services Committee, averaging $20,000 a pop.
Mike Ferguson, then a freshman on Financial Services, was given two fundraisers worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000. Plus, another $750 in 2001 and 2002 from Delk and his wife themselves. Interestingly, $750 is exactly the cost of the restaurant Ferguson used for these fundraisers. Also interestingly, he never got billed for using those restaurants.
As a result of Delk and Freddie Mac illegally using corporate funds and employees to set up these fundraisers, the Federal Election Commission fined them $3.8 million -- the largest fine in FEC history. Public Citizen, which filed the complaint with the FEC, had this to say:
The amount of the fine indicates the magnitude of the violations. The complaint came in the wake of an alarming number of lavish fundraisers hosted by Freddie Mac’s lobbyist – nearly half of which directly benefited lawmakers responsible for overseeing Freddie Mac and mortgage lending practices.
The Republican Governor's Association (RGA) received $150,000 from Freddie Mac, an illegal contribution that the RGA later returned. By giving the money back, the RGA avoided being fined by the FEC. The estimated $40,000 Ferguson received as a result of illegal fundraising by Delk and Freddie Mac should share the same fate.
And don't think this is an isolated incident for Ferguson. This is not the first time he has been involved in FEC cases involving his election to the House and freshman term in 2001 and 2002, and it is likely not the last.
