NJ Fats with his No. 1 and No. 2 guys at the Port Authority, Chairman David Samson (center) and Deputy Exec Director David Baroni (right)
by Ken
In the state of blown-mindedness in which I cobbled my earlier post, I never got around to one of my favorite characters in this little farce of government rape, pillage, and plunder: now-former Port Authority of NY and NJ Chairman David Samson, whose resignation was announced today by his Big Stinking patron, Guv Kris "The Athlete" KrispyKreme.
This account comes from the Washington Post's Jaime Fuller (links onsite):
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) announced Friday that David Samson, chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had resigned earlier in the day. The resignation will be effective immediately.Actually, Fats is just being modest here. His boy David's name pops up all over the Bridgegate scandal.
"He believes that the best way to start a new year at the Port Authority is with new leadership," Christie said. "In line with that belief, David tendered his resignation to me this afternoon, effective immediately."
Christie stressed during the news conference, with a raised voice, that he did not ask Samson to resign, saying that the chairman had raised the idea of leaving about a year ago, and Christie had asked him to stay. He does not believe that Samson played a crucial role in the George Washington Bridge scandal, which has engulfed Christie's year so far.
An internal investigation released by Christie's office Thursday, which provided behind-the-scene details of the so-called Bridgegate scandal and was greeted skeptically by critics, called for the Port Authority to be restructured. Samson was not interviewed by the law firm conducting the investigation. Page 140 of the report states that his law firm Wolff and Samson "declined our request for interviews and documents."And of course the Port Authority itself, the agency over which Samson was Gov. NJ Fats's choice to preside (the working arrangement has been that the NJ governor picks the chairman and the NY governor the executive director), has emerged as a principal resource-extraction and message-enforcement arm of the KrispyKreme administration. It's hardly news by now that a cadre of the leading miscreants in the Bridgegate scandal were KrispyKreme appointments to the agency -- often with extremely vague job descriptions, which seem to have come down to "doing whatever the Boss wants."
Samson and his firm are also being investigated by federal prosecutors for potential conflicts of interest with the Port Authority. A grand jury subpoena was issued in early March for information regarding two bridge contracts awarded by the Port Authority to clients of Wolff and Samson.
In the internal investigation, the Port Authority's e-mail chains about who leaked the bridge story to the Wall Street Journal feature Samson prominently. He told Scott Rechler, who is on the Port Authority's board of commissioners, "I just read it and it confirms evidence of [authority executive director Patrick Foye] being the leak, stirring up trouble -- this is yet another example of a story, we've seen it before, where he distances himself from an issue in the press and rides in on a white horse to save the day. ... [In] this case, he's playing in traffic, made a big mistake." Rechler did not agree with Samson that Foye was the leak.
Nobody has profited more handsomely from the KrispyKreme-Port Authority money spigot than a bunch of clients of the law firm of Chariman Samson. For services rendered therein one assumes that handsome chunks of coin landed in Chairman Samson's personal pocket.
Christie said that he asked Samson in January if he had any knowledge of what was going on, following news reports on the apparently politically motivated scheme to create traffic jams by closing lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge. The internal report released Thursday found that the plan was hatched by David Wildstein, a Christie associate who worked for the Port Authority.Apparently that's Fats's story and he's sticking to it.
According to Christie, Samson said, "Absolutely not." The governor said Friday that "it rang true at the time."
On Sept. 13, Wildstein, appointed to the Port Authority by the governor, sent an e-mail to Christie aide Bridget Kelly saying that Samson would help them "retaliate" after lanes on the George Washington Bridge were re-opened.
Christie told reporters Friday that Samson had "no idea" what Wildstein was talking about. Both Wildstein and Kelly were fired after news of the scandal broke, and the internal investigation also blames them for the incident.
"I obviously believe that having David Wildstein at Port Authority was a mistake," Christie said Friday.
It's worth recalling that Samson was appointed NJ state attorney general by Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevy, having previously been appointed to positions by both Democratic and Republican governors, qualifying him now as genuinely bipartisan sleaze. He only spent 13 months on the job as AG.
Now the Port Authority has undoubtedly been a rich source of patronage for interests in both states it serves. Still, from the shock registered at the shenanigans of the KrispyKrony Krowd at the Port Authority, and I mean registered by people familiar with the agency's traditional workings, one gets the feeling that new ground was broken in corruption and political hand-washing and back-breaking by NJ Fats's gang. Meanwhile the governor was becoming a public hero by laying the blame for NJ's woes on the backs of public workers.
One obvious question: How can you possibly replace a public servant of the stature of David Samson?
Christie said he got Samson's resignation call just two hours before the news conference, and that picking a new Port Authority chair and getting a nominee approved will take some time.It sure would be nice if the governor got to read all about it from his prison cell.
"I suspect the Senate hearing for the forthcoming nominee to replace Samson will need to be held at Giants Stadium," Heath Brown, a professor of political science at Seton Hill University, wrote in an email. "The scrutiny of that nominee will be unprecedented in NJ history."
As for the future of the Port Authority, Christie says he hasn't talked to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) about it yet, although he sees "some merit" in splitting the agency into two departments run individually by the two states.
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