get these nets
Veteran
--------------------------------------------------
Supreme Court Unanimously Overturns ‘Bridgegate’ Convictions
The court said there was evidence of “wrongdoing” by two associates of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, but no federal crime.
Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni leaving a federal courthouse in Newark, N.J., in 2016.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
- May 7, 2020
The case resulted from a decision in 2013 by associates of Mr. Christie to close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in a wild scheme that was meant to punish one of the governor’s political opponents and ended up creating four days of enormous traffic jams that posed risks to public safety.
That was an abuse of power, the Supreme Court ruled, but not a federal crime.
The associates, Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, were convicted of wire fraud and other federal charges for their roles in concocting what they said was a “traffic study” that caused extreme delays for motorists seeking to cross the bridge from Fort Lee, N.J., to Manhattan.
The mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, had rebuffed a request to endorse Mr. Christie’s re-election bid in 2013, and this was his punishment. Mr. Christie has denied any knowledge of the scheme.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Ms. Kelly, an aide to Mr. Christie, wrote in an email to officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, called the communication “an admirably concise email.”
She went on to write that “the evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power.”
“But the federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct,” she wrote. “Under settled precedent, the officials could violate those laws only if an object of their dishonesty was to obtain the Port Authority’s money or property.”
And, she wrote, “the realignment of the toll lanes was an exercise of regulatory power — something this court has already held fails to meet the statutes’ property requirement.”
