Much like in late August and early September, we are seeing another spell of persistent cycles of bad news for Republican gubernatorial nominee Chris Christie.
In this case, the latest revelations compel voters to recall the scandals of summer:
When news broke in August that the former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, had lent $46,000 to a top aide in the federal prosecutor’s office, he said he was merely helping a friend in need. He also said the aide, Michele Brown, had done nothing to help his gubernatorial campaign.
But interviews with federal law enforcement officials suggest that Ms. Brown used her position in two significant and possibly improper ways to try to aid Mr. Christie in his run for governor.
Specifically, the allegations being levelled at Ms. Brown are as follows:
- That she pulled rank in the Spring of 2009 and took over the responsiblity for fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey. Ordinarily, this role would fall to someone else in the office, until Brown insisted on taking it over. This becomes particularly thorny, of course, because the Corzine campaign had filed an FOIA request around this time seeking records from the Christie tenure. These documents were bottled up until August, when Team Corzine filed a series of complaints regarding the apparent stonewalling on their FOIA requests. Among those requests, of course, were the travel records that became such an embarrassment for Christie over the last week.
- The officials also charged that as the New Jersey U.S. Attorney's office was meeting with federal law enforcement vis-a-vis a wide-ranging net of in-state corruption investigations (culminating in a high-profile flurry of arrests in late July), Brown vehemently (and unilaterally) pushed for early arrests in the case. The only plausible reason for wanting arrests to be made ASAP, it would seem, was because Christie's replacement became official on July 1st. Presumably, Christie would be better positioned to take credit for the arrests if they happened officially "on his watch."
Christie's relationship with Brown, who served as his assistant during his tenure in the U.S. Attorney's office, has been under scrutiny for much of the campaign.
Of course, Brown's name became central to the campaign when it was revealed this summer that Christie had extended a $46,000 loan to her, a fact which looks a great deal less benign in the face of these new charges.
For her part, predictably, Brown is vehemently denying the charges in the New York Times piece, proclaiming that they are "outrageous and inaccurate". Of course, she also declined the NYT's request for an interview to clarify the record.
One thing that is growing increasingly evident is that Christie's tenure in the U.S. Attorney's office, once seen as his most bankable political asset, has become a political albatross that continues to generate drama in a campaign that can ill-afford any more bad news cycles.