Partners in Power: The Unlikely Alliance of Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie

Sept. 15, 2014, a scant few days after they had crossed paths at remembrance ceremonies for the anniversary of 9/11, the governors of New York and New Jersey prepared for a joint press conference in New York City. The topic at hand was the top-to-bottom regional security review Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie had ordered.

Ostensibly the meeting was precipitated by events overseas that warranted a new level of vigilance at home. The organization known as the Islamic State was gaining ground in Syria and Iraq, and the suggestion was that the dangerous terrorist organization was determined to strike here. (That the primary goal of ISIS is actually to establish an Islamic State in the Middle East is one of many facts that rarely seem to get in the way of Western interpretations of Islamic movements.)

Begging the question of what exactly our security precautions have been over the past 13 years and whether they had suddenly grown lax, the review seemed beside the point. Beyond gathering human intelligence through infiltrating groups such as ISIS to stop attacks before they happen, there is little local law enforcement can really do besides staying visible and vigilant. Anyone who has ever traveled on a major holiday has experienced the embodiment of this policy. 

Earlier that day Gov. Cuomo’s office sent word to me, along with NY1 photographer Bryan Terry, that we were to attend a private ultra-high-level security meeting with the two governors, which would take place before their scheduled press avail.

Arriving well in advance, we were eventually whisked up to an upper floor conference room packed with New York and New Jersey law enforcement officials, many of whom I recognized or knew from my 13 years covering New Jersey politics.

Cuomo arrived first. Taking the long way around the room, he entered from the opposite side of where we had set up our camera, joking to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson as he passed us that they should not have let me in. We prepared to get the money shot of Christie and Cuomo sitting beside the secretary, but there was only one problem: Gov. Christie was nowhere to be found. After we spent some time filming a conspicuously empty chair, restless Homeland Security flacks told us to head downstairs with the rest of the media. Swimming into action, Cuomo’s communications director, Melissa DeRosa, pulled us aside to await Christie’s arrival. DeRosa is a person who, if she wants something done, it gets done: She was going to make sure we got the shot of Christie and Cuomo together.

Christie finally arrived, cell phone attached to his ear. As we were led back into the secret meeting room, he took his seat at the table, not looking up as he ended his call and continued to fiddle with his phone’s keyboard. He was clearly preoccupied. If it was such an important security meeting, shouldn’t his head have been a little more in the game? 

After we were escorted downstairs to the lobby for the press conference, we got an unexpected heads-up: The two governors would be talking to the media a full 45 minutes early.

That was the only surprise as far as the press conference went. The governors vowed to work together to review the regional security plan and refused to answer any off-topic questions. (Note to politicians: Do not tell people what they are allowed to ask you, especially when making the point that terrorists want to kill us because they hate our freedom.)

It wasn’t clear why the two governors, whose tenure as the heads of neighboring states has overlapped for four years but who had never before held a press conference together, chose to do so now. Or why, less than 10 days later, they held another on the same subject, rather than simply issuing a press release on either occasion. “Definitely weird, and a little crazy,” noted a former aide to one of the governors.

Odder still, they held a third joint press conference a few weeks later, this time to announce a new quarantine policy for those health workers who had treated Ebola patients in Western Africa and who were returning to Port Authority-run airports in New York and New Jersey. The mandatory quarantine policy they instituted (apparently softened as it was rolled out over the next few days following the hastily called late-October presser), was roundly criticized by scientists, the White House and organizations that send doctors into the field to treat Ebola. Interestingly, much of the public seemed to back the governors at the height of the Ebola scare in the days following New York City’s first confirmed case of the virus.

The partnership between Christie and Cuomo is a fascinating case study in the transcendence of political ideology for the sake of personal expediency. There are larger forces at play that draw the governors together, like the shared bridges and tunnels of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which literally connect their two states. But there is also something more practical. These two big personalities, both of whom have a reputation for rough play, could have chosen to go to war many times over any number of issues the last four years, but instead opted to work together. Neither man seems inclined to provoke a battle with the one guy who could probably take the other one down.

Different Styles, Same Objective

On the surface, Christie and Cuomo could not be more different. Christie is brash, outspoken and always eager to pick a fight in public. One Trenton State House veteran is fond of describing the New Jersey governor as someone who “likes to begin a conversation by tossing a hand grenade into the room.”

Cuomo is in many ways his exact opposite. Much stealthier in how he handles people and situations, he is a behind-the-scenes operator, someone who gets what he wants from people by decidedly not making a scene. 

Both men have been labeled bullies. While Christie comes at you head-on, however, Cuomo quietly turns the screws out of public view. Christie would be the type of assassin who bludgeons you to death with a baseball bat, making a bloody mess, whereas Cuomo would kill you quickly and quietly with one bullet to the back of the head—a shot you would never see coming. As Bridgegate taught us, Christie’s methods are often sloppy and can burn a trail. Cuomo rarely leaves fingerprints. His knowledge of Bridgegate and any role he may have played in covering up the scandal remains a secret. 

If Christie is perhaps the more naturally gifted politician, Cuomo is considerably shrewder. Christie enters a room and immediately wins over the crowd with his signature straight talk and endearing personal stories. Michael Aron, a political reporter in New Jersey for more than four decades who has studied crowd reactions during Christie’s town hall meetings, says, “Invariably everyone is smiling. It’s a gift that could carry him to the presidential nomination in 2016.” 

Notes Nick Acocella, another veteran New Jersey reporter, “In politics, you need three things. You gotta get the policy right, you gotta get the politics right, and you gotta get the joke. And Chris Christie gets all three.” 

Cuomo, by contrast, will not open any doors for himself by sheer force of personality. Believed to harbor presidential ambitions, the governor will need a solid record to run on—which is precisely why he has been systematically trying to restore confidence and functionality to government in Albany the last four years by publicly being the adult in the room but privately using the full power of the office behind closed doors to force and cajole a stubborn Legislature into doing things on his terms. 

While there are clear differences between Cuomo and Christie, there is much that binds them. Both embrace a pragmatic brand of politics that transcends party or ideology. In his autobiography, All Things Possible, Cuomo writes about adopting a “tell it like it is” strategy for his first gubernatorial campaign in 2002—words that are Christie’s reflexive mantra. Cuomo’s memoir also restates one of his core beliefs about politics: “The left-right debate misses the mark and is a trap for the Democratic Party.” 

Christie has also tried to govern from the center. His positions on issues like immigration (he supports a path to citizenship) and the environment (he believes climate change is real) seem much more moderate than those of the current crop of Republicans likely to vie for their party’s nomination for president in 2016. Christie has also been non-partisan in his hiring. He recently brought former Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey’s onetime chief of staff Jamie Fox into his administration as the new commissioner of transportation. Fox is known in New Jersey for a storm-the-beach brand of partisan politics. He is also a very effective manager, and Christie puts competence above partisanship any day. One former Christie aide joked of Fox’s hiring, “You know the rule down in Trenton: If you spend enough time down at the State House, eventually the administration just hires you.”

Christie took office in January 2010 with New Jersey facing a structural deficit of $11 billion. With the economy sputtering, the new governor immediately seized the opportunity to cut costs by tapping into public resentment of public employees. He promptly went to war with the New Jersey Education Association, New Jersey’s largest teachers’ union, and the Communications Workers of America, which represents state workers. Christie insisted that public sector unions and everyone else who cared to work with the new administration “come to the center of the room.” (Translation: Be prepared for givebacks because the gravy train is over.) Christie immediately proposed a one-year pay freeze for teachers and higher contributions toward healthcare costs. He then went even further by calling for an end to teacher tenure and raising the retirement age for state workers.

When Cuomo took office in 2011 the Democrat and son of liberal icon Mario Cuomo seemed to take a page from his Republican counterpart across the river. With New York facing a similarly large $10 billion deficit in early 2011, the new governor locked in a three-year wage freeze on base salaries for 66,000 members of the Civil Service Employees Association. It was even harsher than Christie’s deal with the 35,000-member CWA, which instituted a pay freeze for the first year but allowed a 1 percent hike in the second year.

Christie also moved quickly to freeze the rate of increase for state spending and to cap local property taxes at 2 percent each year. A year later Cuomo adopted virtually the same policy—prompting Christie to mention him in his 2011 Budget Message:

“Across the Hudson River, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget also cuts the actual dollars spent by the state—for the first time in 14 years. Why? The reason Governor Cuomo gave is simple. He said, ‘New York is at a crossroads, and we must seize this opportunity, make hard choices, and set our state on a new path toward prosperity.’ The challenge, the change, and even the choice of words are similar to where New Jersey was one year ago.”

Christie, a man who has started fights with too many governors across the nation to count, has never attacked Cuomo personally or criticized his policy choices. The two are known to communicate frequently, and despite their different party affiliations have adopted an unspoken “non-aggression pact.” 

“Ultimately it’s not that Cuomo and Christie are such good friends,” says one Republican insider. “They just both represent the non-partisan incumbency party.” Larger money interests trump party or politics, a universally recognized state of affairs. “In the U.S., there is basically one party,” leftist linguist/philosopher Noam Chomsky once said: “the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans.”

The ties between the governors actually run quite deep, beginning with the lobbying and public relations firm Mercury Public Affairs. Christie’s political guru Mike DuHaime, the architect of Rudy Giuliani’s failed 2008 bid for the presidency, is a partner at Mercury. Having somehow avoided scrutiny in the Bridgegate scandal, DuHaime will likely take the lead on Christie’s 2016 campaign.

Another Mercury partner who played a role in Giuliani’s campaign, Michael McKeon, went on in 2010 to head up “Republicans for Cuomo,” a group that was resurrected this year for Cuomo’s re-election. McKeon previously served in the Pataki Administration, as did Thomas
Doherty, yet another partner at Mercury. In 2013 the firm hired Karen Hinton, wife of Cuomo’s then–director of state operations Howard Glaser. Hinton quietly resigned a few months later after the New York Post disclosed her hiring at a “substantial six-figure salary.” The Post claimed the governor was upset about the hiring, though he was likely more upset about the fact that it was reported. 

“Republicans for Cuomo” faded into the background in 2011 after Cuomo’s election, and a new group appeared called the Committee to Save New York (CSNY), led by none other than … Mike McKeon. With the financial backing, according to sources, of groups such as the Real Estate Board of New York, the Business Council of New York State and the Partnership for New York, CSNY proceeded to run TV ads promoting Gov. Cuomo’s agenda. Its tax status left the Committee free to raise unlimited amounts of money. Meanwhile, independent of the group, Cuomo was able to raise money for his own re-election campaign three years hence. So even as CSNY defended the governor over the airwaves for his controversial fiscal tightening policies, Cuomo spent his own time and resources raising money to defeat any potential challenger in the next election. (He would go on to raise an astronomical $45 million, by far the largest sum of any governor in the nation up for re-election this past year.) 

Despite a pounding from the press about a complete lack of transparency from Cuomo, CSNY’s exact donor list and the amounts given to it were never revealed. In 2012 the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), which had been created by the governor and the Legislature in 2011, adopted new disclosure rules for 501(c)(4)’s like the Committee to Save New York, but the look-back period was very limited. (For some reason the new disclosure laws were not part of the original legislation establishing JCOPE.)

While the Committee never had to disclose its donor list, tax filings showed that CSNY had paid nearly $140,000 to Mercury for “communications.” The Committee quietly melted away before those new donor laws would have forced it to be more transparent. 

Cuomo shares with Christie such big-time donors as Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, who tried to convince Christie to run for president in 2012. In 2003, when Langone was chair of the New York Stock Exchange compensation committee, he personally approved a $140 million compensation package for NYSE CEO Richard Grasso—a “golden parachute” that came in the wake of major corporate scandals including Enron and WorldCom. Then–Attorney General Eliot Spitzer demanded that $100 million of it be returned to taxpayers. But Cuomo took what one insider described as a “different tack” with Grasso and Langone in his role as then–attorney general in 2007. After the Court of Appeals, New York State’s highest court, ruled that Grasso was in fact entitled to his $140 million, in July 2008, Cuomo said he had no intention of appealing the decision, and he was true to his word. Spitzer’s case was over, and Langone and Grasso likely became Cuomo’s new BFFs.

One Hand Washes the Other

In September 2013, more than a year before Cuomo was up for reelection, Tishman Speyer President and Co-CEO Rob Speyer summoned a select group to discuss the 2014 election: State Republican Chairman Ed Cox, Republican Senate Conference Leader Dean Skelos, then–state GOP Executive Director Michael Lawler and Republican Senate Counsel Robert Mujica.

Speyer began the meeting by telling the attendees that he had “been friends with Andrew Cuomo for 20 years,” according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, so as not to upset any of the parties involved. The governor had asked him to call this meeting, Speyer explained, because like them, Cuomo wanted to keep the State Senate in Republican hands. If the party ran a candidate who could potentially beat Cuomo in 2014, however, the governor would spend $40 million to defeat that candidate and Senate Republicans.

Skelos responded first: The person they were considering was Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, he said. At this point, Astorino had not yet won re-election in Westchester.

“Well, that is the one candidate you can’t run,” said Speyer. 

It was “a load of shit,” Lawler jumped in to say, that they could not run a real candidate without risking losing the governor’s support for the
Senate.

After a heated back-and-forth, the meeting ended with no agreement.

Some time later Speyer received a call from Cox, who is the son-in-law of former President Richard Nixon: Astorino was their candidate, Cox said, and he was running. Jumping quickly off the phone, Speyer called back 20 minutes later with a direct message from Gov. Cuomo: “FUCK YOU! FUCK REPUBLICANS! AND FUCK RICHARD-FUCKING-NIXON! I WILL GO AFTER YOU!” 

Asked about the exchange, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said, “That is a reporter’s conspiratorial delusion.” 

Eventually the governor would commit to a progressive agenda to win the backing of the Working Families Party, which was on the verge of endorsing Fordham professor Zephyr Teachout to punish Cuomo for his centrist approach to governance and propensity for collaborating with the GOP. Facing the defection of the left—the faction that votes most prolifically in Democratic primaries—Cuomo pledged publicly to push for a veritable wish list of liberal priorities including campaign finance reform, the DREAM Act and a bill codifying abortion rights in New York State. More importantly, Cuomo agreed to put his weight behind state Democrats’ foremost aim: taking over complete control of the Legislature by winning the State Senate. However, critics charge that once Cuomo got the WFP nod, he paid little more than lip service to his promise. When it came time for the governor to actually campaign for the Democrats’ Senate candidates, Cuomo failed to show up for incumbents in key races like Cecilia Tkacyzk’s and Terry Gipson’s in the Hudson Valley. While he did make a campaign appearance for himself in Rochester during which he spoke warmly of Democratic State Sen. Ted O’Brien, who was at his side, some viewed the half-hearted effort as too little too late. All three incumbents lost, swinging control of the Senate firmly into Republican hands. 

Insiders say that was likely the governor’s hope all along. Just as he had used it in his first term, a Republican-controlled Senate would continue to provide Cuomo with both a foil to blame for measures he could not or did not actually want to pass, and the ability to frame his victories as bipartisan achievements, a valuable record for a potential candidate for national office to claim in an era of fiercely partisan gridlock.

The Rise of Christie

Like Cuomo, who withdrew when he first ran for governor in 2002 after making a blunderous remark about George Pataki, Chris Christie suffered setbacks on his eventual road to success in New Jersey. In 1994 Christie was elected to the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders. He then ran unsuccessfully for the state Assembly. Three years later, after picking fights with people on the county legislative board and facing difficulties, in particular with members of his own party, he was voted off the Freeholder board. 

In 2001, however, Christie’s old friend George W. Bush tapped him to be Newark’s U.S. Attorney. (Christie had befriended the younger Bush while volunteering for the elder Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign.) In his seven years on the job, Christie truly shone, amassing a staggering record of convictions against public officials. He won all 130 of his public corruption cases. During some of these high profile prosecutions—which included convictions of former New Jersey Senate President John Lynch and Cory Booker’s predecessor as Newark’s mayor, Sharpe James—Christie also proved adept at holding blustery press conferences.

New Jersey may be essentially a blue state in its presidential vote, but its selection of governors over the years has been bipartisan. Republican governors such as Tom Kean and Christine Todd Whitman thrived for two terms each. By contrast, at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, incumbent Democrat Gov. Jon Corzine was wildly unpopular. With many financial back office jobs located in New Jersey, it is often those lower-level employees who are thrown out the door first when mass layoffs hit, and this was the case back in 2008. And as a result, New Jersey was hit particularly hard as unemployment skyrocketed.

Though he had previously been head of Goldman Sachs, Corzine was not well-regarded by the business community, which was unhappy over his raising of the state’s sales tax in 2006. The fight over that tax increase was so contentious that New Jersey shut down its government for six days. Eventually Corzine got his 1 percent increase, but though he had won the battle, he had lost the war. Rumblings about Christie’s political ambitions had begun shortly after he became U.S. Attorney, and key business community members such as MetLife’s Tom Considine (who served on a number of boards) decided to back Christie for governor in 2009. To avoid antagonizing Corzine and the Democrats, Considine and others helped Christie stealthily, funneling money through the national Republican Governors Association. The organization would pour millions into Christie’s ultimately triumphant race. 

Christie would later name Considine his commissioner of Banking and Insurance.

A Bridge Between Governors

What happened between Cuomo and Christie in regard to the Bridgegate scandal remains a mystery. In September 2013 Cuomo’s handpicked executive director at the bi-state Port Authority, Pat Foye, sent an email identifying lane closures on the Fort Lee side of the George Washington Bridge in September 2013 as a violation of law. “I believe this hasty and ill-advised decision violates Federal Law and the laws of both States,” Foye wrote.

However, Foye did not inform outside authorities about this potential violation of law—which is now under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Newark, Paul Fishman. Accounts differ as to whether Foye even went to the Port Authority Inspector General with this information. Foye claims he sent an email to the IG’s office, the law enforcement arm of the bi-state agency, but there is no evidence of his having done so. It was not until the scandal became public months later that the office finally opened an investigation.

The U.S. Attorney will ultimately determine whether Christie knew about the lane closures ahead of time. Less clear is what Cuomo knew about the lane closures, and what he did or didn’t do to investigate them. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Christie called Cuomo in December to ask him to advise Foye to back off. Sources say those conversations took place a lot earlier, however—and some have speculated that Cuomo promptly brought Foye to heel in the early autumn of 2013, while Christie was in the middle of his re-election campaign, giving him time to sort out the mess on his end. The scandal didn’t blow up until after he was safely re-elected.

Did Cuomo take deliberate action to protect Christie? Officially Cuomo says he did not find out about the lane closures until sometime in the autumn of 2013 when he “heard it on the radio.” Considering his own executive director called the lane closures a violation of New York law, it seems odd that a governor whose job description includes oversight of the Port Authority might have missed that fact. 

Indeed Cuomo, about to face his own re-election campaign, seemed to have the incoming head of the RGA over a barrel. According to the widely reported narrative, Christie’s top two appointees at the Port Authority, Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, had shut down access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee as part of a half-cocked revenge scheme against Fort Lee’s mayor for failing to endorse Christie for re-election. That charge has not been proven in a court of law, but Baroni and Wildstein resigned several months after the closures, after erroneously claiming the lanes had been shut down because of an innocuous traffic study. In December Foye testified before the New Jersey Legislature’s special investigatory committee in Trenton that there was no traffic study. Wildstein resigned before Foye’s Dec. 9 appearance, Baroni just after it.

Asked on Dec. 12 about the resignations, Cuomo said, “To the extent there was misbehavior by officials at the Port Authority, I think that has been addressed by the recent resignations.”

The governor made very few subsequent public statements on the matter, and held very few press availabilities in Albany during the first three months of 2014 when the Bridgegate scandal was exploding on the national stage.

Cuomo had his own agenda. He was focused on getting re-elected. He clearly didn’t want to face Astorino, and if he had to, he didn’t want Astorino getting any help from the RGA. As Cuomo remained mostly silent about Bridgegate, Christie granted him his wish.

Lost Causes

The month before Foye’s testimony, Christie was formally elected head of the RGA in Arizona at the organization’s annual conference. As one of the RGA’s biggest success stories, he was a natural to be its chairman. Astorino met with Christie at the event, and Christie reportedly assured Astorino he would assist in the Republican’s challenge to Cuomo. Asked about that meeting on a conference call later in the month, however, Cuomo said, “I can tell you this: I spoke to Governor Christie this morning, who told me the exact opposite. And I’ll leave it at that.”

In March 2014 Astorino formally announced his candidacy for governor. In the months that followed, Christie and the RGA did absolutely nothing for him, a snub so blatant Christie was asked about it in July while campaigning for Thomas Foley, the Republican candidate for governor in Connecticut. When questioned why he wasn’t helping Astorino, Christie said he did not invest in “lost causes.” Ouch.

Reaction from the Astorino camp was initially measured. Reaching out to Christie and his people through back channels, they essentially said, “What’s done is done. Now please fix it.”

The response from Camp Christie was in effect: “No.”

The man charged with promoting Republican candidates for governor had apparently developed an inflated sense of his own job security. Christie made his comments dismissing Astorino just two days before revelations about Cuomo’s interference with the Moreland Commission. If there were ever a time for Republicans to rally behind their candidate in New York, it was that week.

Christie also spoke infelicitously about the RGA’s specific distribution of its resources in the various races across the country. “We don’t invest in landslides,” he said, which was certainly not true in his own case: The RGA spent roughly $1.7 million on Christie’s landslide victory over Democrat Barbara Buono in 2013—a race he more than likely would have won handily without such excessive spending. (Christie ultimately defeated Buono by 22 points.) 

Nor has Christie been consistent in regard to his approach to supporting other “lost causes.” Astorino was consistently down 20 points or more against Cuomo; but in June Christie passed him over to campaign in New Hampshire for gubernatorial candidate Walt Havenstein, whose polling was even worse, down 26 points at the time. (Havenstein ultimately was defeated by the incumbent Maggie Hassan by 5 points.) Christie also campaigned—as one could argue the head of the RGA should—for Neel Kashkari in California, who ended up losing by 18 percent of the vote. The RGA also spent hundreds of thousands on ads in New Mexico, according to sources, even though Republican Gov. Susana Martinez was always solidly ahead; and more than $800,000 in Iowa, where Terry Branstad won by 22 points.

Rather than quietly accepting being hung out to dry by Christie, Astorino eventually fired back, telling reporters at a Lower Manhattan Press conference in July, “If Governor Christie is unable to help a Republican candidate for governor, then maybe he should consider stepping down as chairman of the RGA.”

Astorino went on to say aloud what many had been thinking: that Christie and Cuomo were working together to keep Bridgegate quiet, and part of that bargain entailed Christie staying clear of New York governor’s race, despite his unique ability to assist Cuomo’s opponent.

“I think whatever Governor Christie knew or didn’t know is probably the same for Governor Cuomo and if there is anything being held back that Governor Cuomo knows and he’s holding that over Christie’s head, I don’t know,” said Astorino.

Though generating a brief buzz, Astorino’s allegations were petered out and he chose not to repeat them as the campaign wore on.

Questionable Authority

Beyond the politics of Bridgegate and the election year posturing lies a far more serious structural problem at the Port Authority. The agency’s mission is to ensure the safe transfer of people and goods throughout the region. The Bridgegate scandal revealed that career
employees at the bi-state agency feared for their jobs if they interfered with the activities of certain gubernatorial appointees. For an agency dedicated to keeping the region moving and its economy sound, that would seem to be a big problem. That the lane closures appear to have been ordered by the governor’s office’s Bridget Kelly, who famously wrote in an email, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” only highlights how desperately reform is needed.

So how did the Port Authority get into its current predicament? Jameson Doig, author of a book about the agency’s history, Empire on the Hudson, says that while the Authority has always been a backwater of patronage, Gov. Christie took the practice to new heights, appointing more than 70 people—primarily those who helped him out in the 2009 election—to jobs within the agency, both high and low level. He used the Authority as a patronage mill, “sort of the way Frank Hague operated in Jersey City,” said Doig, referring to the famously corrupt mayor who was said to have a desk at City Hall in Jersey City with a drawer that slid open to both sides of the desk for people coming into the office to drop off bribes or payoffs.

When the Port Authority was established in 1921, Doig notes in his impeccably researched book, commissioners were appointed to six-year terms, a measure designed to transcend politics and insulate its staff from the political whims of governors from one party or the other. Until the mid-1970s the board chose the Authority’s executive director. In the late ’70s, however, the agency began to involve the governors more, eventually dividing up the roster so that New York’s governor got to appoint the executive director and New Jersey’s governor the board chairman. That practice worked until the 1990s, when New York Gov. George Pataki opted to appoint George Marlin, a financier who had been helpful to him in securing the Staten Island vote. Sources say then–New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was “appalled.” She decided New Jersey needed to appoint a deputy executive director to keep an eye on Marlin, and the position stuck, creating political chaos between the two states as they battled over everything from resources to patronage appointments. To have the deputy executive director answering to the New Jersey governor, and the executive director answering to New York’s governor was precisely the kind of situation that could lead to something like Bridgegate. Though Baroni was deputy executive director, he reported not to Executive Director Pat Foye, technically his boss, but directly to Christie. “That took us off the rails,” notes one insider.

The fragmentation and divided staff loyalties made the once impossible now inevitable.

In Doig’s history Cuomo gets credit for viewing the Port Authority as semiindependent, declining to install his own patronage appointments by the dozens. He did, however, apparently look the other way when it came to Bridgegate.

In the end Cuomo seems to have gained a considerable amount from Bridgegate, avoiding the personal embarrassment Christie suffered while managing to wrest control of projects dear to his heart, such as the renovation of New York’s airports. Cuomo wanted New York State to control the revamping of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, and with Christie’s apparent authorization, he got his way. With Vice President Joe Biden at his side at an Oct. 20 event at a school near LaGuardia, Cuomo detailed his new airport proposal. “I spoke to Governor Christie about this months ago, where I said I thought the Port Authority was not moving quickly enough on these airports. I said to him, ‘The airports are in my state, and I would prefer to take responsibility.’ ... And he said, ‘That’s fine.’ And I said, ‘Look, if you want to be responsible for the assets in your state, I am fine with that.’ And he said, ‘Great,’ all around. He could not have been more cooperative in that discussion, and this was over a year ago.”

According to that time frame, the discussion between the two governors must have taken place right around the time Bridgegate flared up. It also seems likely that Cuomo was able to convince Christie to do the three aforementioned Homeland Security-related press conferences with him in the weeks leading up to Cuomo’s re-election day. We may never know if this plausible tit-for-tat is part of a larger framework under which the Port Authority still operates, or an omertà between the two men to keep hidden what they knew about the scandal—but it certainly looks like high-level collusion. 

Foye’s testimony last year, which broke open the scandal, was before the New Jersey Legislative Select Committee. Created specifically to investigate Bridgegate, the committee has subpoena power but cannot prosecute. Baroni’s testimony before the committee was technically not under oath, which may make indicting him on a perjury charge more difficult.

Democratic Assemblyman John Wisniewski of Middlesex County, the committee’s mild-mannered co-chair, began investigating the lane closures in his capacity as chairman of the powerful Assembly Transportation Committee. (In New Jersey, committees actually have power to hold public hearings on critical pieces of legislation, something that is never done under the current leadership in New York State; bills are merely reported out of committee or laid aside.) Although Wisniewski has managed to make a name for himself by leading the investigation against Christie, by his own account, “The investigation has stalled.”

The Select Committee has very limited ability to call any meaningful witnesses, according to Wisniewski, because of the U.S. Attorney’s ongoing investigation. Foye’s scheduled testimony last summer was canceled due to his cooperation with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Investigators consider Foye the key to unraveling the entire mystery. “We don’t want to start bringing in collateral witnesses,” says Wisniewski.

The Select Committee’s subpoena power will expire in 2016, but Wisniewski expects it to wrap up its work much sooner. Christie has criticized the work of the Committee, accusing it of conducting a witch hunt, replete with strategic leaks to the press. Wisniewski, also known in political circles as “The Wiz,” considers it “wonderfully ironic that Christie is decrying leaks, considering he is the man who wrote the book on them,” a reference to the extensive conversations Christie was known to have with reporters from his work phone when he was U.S. Attorney in Newark.

Room for Reform?

With the investigation on hold, reform-minded legislators in both states believe they have the best opportunity in years to make lasting changes at the behemoth that is the Port Authority. This past year a package of reform bills unanimously passed both houses of Albany’s Legislature. The legislation would make the Authority subject to open public record laws of both states, require that its meetings be open to the public, establish audit and finance committees within the body, and mandate an annual report by an independent auditor that gets sent to the governor, state comptroller and each state’s Legislature.

While certainly not perfect, the legislation is the best chance of reforming the Authority in modern history. Initially, it was held up in New Jersey. The bill passed the state Senate, but was blocked by Wisniewski, who felt the reforms didn’t go far enough, sources say. Wisniewski maintains that the Port Authority requires a governance change: “Right now the executive branch in both states has the sole authority to appoint commissioners, leading to a very myopic agency,” he says. “They only see what is in front of them for the short term.” 

If New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund, which funds transportation projects, were broke, for example, governors would raid the Port Authority, the way Christie diverted funds set aside for Access to the Region’s Core (ARC), the stalled rail tunnel project under the Hudson River to Manhattan, to rebuild the Pulaski Skyway. The latter is not even a Port Authority asset like the Holland Tunnel but merely an access road to the tunnel.

Wisniewski recommends that the Port Authority commissioners rather than the governor be given the authority to choose the executive director. That is the way most boards operate, he says, noting that the Port Authority would be better off if the two governors had less control.

“When you want to make significant change to any organization, you don’t start small, then go big. It’s a winnowing process—a compromise process.”

Insiders say Wisniewski likely harbors ambitions beyond his current station, and some believe he held up the reform legislation because he intends to run for governor and needs to plant his flag. “Wisniewksi wants to be the author of any reforms that come out of Bridgegate,” said one New Jersey Democrat.

Wisniewski disputes this take; he is simply “reluctant to agree” that the current bills constitute a reform package, he says. “I agree with everything in the bill, but it doesn’t do enough.”

In late October, the New Jersey Assembly dropped its opposition to the package. The bill has moved out of committee and has now passed the full Assembly. That means identical pieces of legislation have now passed a total of four houses in two states, no small feat. The big question now is how willing the two governors on whose watches the Bridgegate scandal unfolded will be to sign monumental legislation that will likely water down their control of the very agency that draws them together.

Zack Fink has been the state house reporter for NY1 since January 2012, covering news in both New York City and Albany. Prior to working at NY1, Zack spent 13 years as a political reporter in New Jersey.