Drip, drip, drip....
Days before announcing his resignation as a federal prosecutor, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie agreed to hire the son of his friend and mentor, Herbert J. Stern, as an assistant U.S. attorney.
The move sparked public criticism from Democrats, who accused Christie of using his post as New Jersey’s top federal law enforcement official for patronage. But interviews last week showed it also drew private concern from prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark.
Even if the Sam Stern had wound up being the assistant U.S. Attorney of the Year, this would look pretty awful. As it happens, his colleagues apparently have neither good nor ill to say about the job performance of the new addition to their team.
What they are talking about is how Christie intervened in the process to hire the son of a friend, despite the fact that the interview team charged with vetting the younger Stern were nearly universal in their negative assessment of the candidate.
Typically, according to the Star-Ledger, any candidate for a job as U.S. Attorney goes through an initial round of interviews with rank-and-file prosecutors. Assuming those interviews go well, they go to a second round of interviews with division supervisors. Finally, if they survive the first two rounds of interviews, they make it to the final interview, which will be with either the U.S. Attorney or a top-tier deputy.
Stern, according to multiple sources interviewed by the Star-Ledger, bombed the first interview. That would, presumably, be the end of the line for the prospective candidate.
Instead (presumably with a nudge from Christie), Stern was given a second first-round interview. This one, according to the report, did not go much better than the first.
Nevertheless, Stern was granted a subsequent interview at the second-tier supervisorial level, and then was hired by Christie not long after that.
Stern's father, Herbert Stern, is a giant figure in New Jersey legal and political circles. More importantly to the matter at hand, he was instrumental in giving Christie cover by praising his selection as U.S. Attorney back in 2002. Christie had been derided as a political and ideological choice for U.S. Attorney, seeing how his previous experience seemed to amount to little more than being a fundraiser for George W. Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign (something that Christie basically confessed to back in 2007). Stern was one of the most prominent endorsers of that selection.
This episode further destroys the meme, so carefully constructed by the Christie campaign over the Spring and Summer of 2009, of Chris Christie as the last honorable fighter of corruption in the den of iniquity that is New Jersey politics.
The erosion of that myth has been a core cause of his descent back to earth, politically speaking. Now, with eight days remaining in Campaign 2009, a sure Christie victory in August is now a toss-up that seems to rapidly be getting away from the grasp of the Republicans.