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Wildstein’s agenda, though, proves to be larger than advancing any one candidate.
In a posted mission statement, he says the site “means to inject our views into the political arena.” His biases, he admits, are personal: “We have favorites just like you, and there are some New Jersey pols we really dislike.” Wally Edge’s favorites include three operatives from the Franks campaign: Mike DuHaime, Bill Stepien, and Bill Baroni.
All three will go on to become major players in New Jersey politics and key figures in the Chris Christie administration.
Wally Edge is not overtly partisan, though.
As they say in baseball, he is a fan of the game.
He disdains those he deems phonies and appreciates operators.
(“Among those of us who pay inordinate attention to politics in New Jersey, Wally Edge had an unusual seat at the table,” says Robert Torricelli, the Democratic power broker known as “the Torch,” who was a U.S. senator at the time.
“I always liked him because I was always one of his favorites.”) Wildstein would sometimes describe his audience as “people who get the joke.” The joke is that, beneath all the theatrics of ideology, politics is about people competing for status.
In that sense — and in many others — our institutions of government are not so different from high school.
Chris Christie has found a new calling, too.
He spends the 2000 campaign raising money and working as a lawyer for George W. Bush, drawing Wally Edge’s ire when he appears to be cooperating with one of Franks’s primary opponents.
But then Bush appoints Christie to be a U.S. Attorney, and he begins to arrest public officeholders for corruption.
In New Jersey, criminal investigations are considered to be politics by other means — that’s another part of the joke — and Wildstein is quick to appreciate how cannily Christie is positioning himself.
In 2002, the website names him its “Politician of the Year.” It constantly touts his prospects for higher office, attaching “corruption-busting” before every mention of his name.
And there is so much corruption to bust!
Christie obtains an indictment for Essex County executive James Treffinger, one of Franks’s old GOP-primary opponents, and has him handcuffed in front of his family home.
Politics­NJ is credited with the scoop and revels in Treffinger’s downfall.
After he pleads guilty, the site publishes a Photoshopped picture of the politician in prison stripes.
Christie later arrests developer Charles Kushner, a major Democratic contributor, who ultimately pleads guilty to making illegal campaign contributions and retaliating against a witness, his brother-in-law, by luring him into a videotaped encounter with a prostitute.
(PoliticsNJ refers to him as a “budding filmmaker.”) Whenever Wally Edge finds out that Christie is investigating someone — as he frequently does, somehow — he writes that the target is “hearing the cellos,” a reference to the Jaws theme.
In 2004, Governor Jim McGreevey, a Democrat, starts hearing the cellos.
An FBI informant has caught him on tape uttering “Machiavelli,” which is allegedly a code word signaling his complicity in an illegal fund-raising scheme.
The governor hastily resigns, explaining that he is a “gay American” and has been carrying on an affair with a former aide.
(PoliticsNJ has been dropping hints about the aide and his “unique skill set” for years.)
Republican leaders then try to draft Christie to run for governor, and Edge has an authoritative description of Christie’s thinking as he considers, and then rejects, the opportunity.
Christie will always deny leaking, but he definitely appreciates the site’s influence.
Long after Wildstein has stopped blogging, Christie still calls him “Wally.” Wally Edge has more power than David Wildstein ever did.
Communicating almost exclusively by AOL Instant Messenger, Wildstein maintains a web of informants inside both parties.
Over the years, PoliticsNJ evolves into a real news organization.
The site hires a small staff of professional reporters, none of whom know their boss’s true identity.
Wildstein turns out to be a good judge of talent.
One of the website’s first hires is Steve Kornacki, who goes on to become a political analyst on MSNBC.
Wildstein has dreams of expanding his model into every state, but the site can never generate much revenue from its few ads.
In 2007, he decides to sell the site to someone who can invest.
An unlikely buyer materializes: Jared Kushner, Charles’s 26-year-old son.
Wally Edge announces the sale with his own invocation of Machiavelli: “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” Wildstein’s email presented during hearings on the lane closures.
Photo: Mel Evans/AP Photo The Kushner family is also from Livingston.
Charles’s reputation may be tarnished, but Jared has a plan to expand their influence by buying media properties, first in New York (he already owns the New York Observer) and now back home in New Jersey.
Wildstein agrees to sell on two conditions: He wants to remain anonymous, and he wants to keep possession of Wally Edge’s AOL email account, which contains much information that might interest the Kushners.
(“The repository of secrets that David collected is like nothing I’d ever seen,” says Jordan Lieberman, who managed the business side of PoliticsNJ for years.)
Kushner agrees.
He tells his employees at the Observer that they could learn something about digital media from Wally Edge, whom he admiringly calls “a wild man.” Wildstein swoons for Kushner, decides he is another prodigy.
He ends up attending Kushner’s wedding to Ivanka Trump.
Kushner puts Wildstein in charge of building a national network, and they hire staff in 17 states.
But it turns out statehouse gossip is hard to produce at scale.
After the 2008 election and the real-estate crash, Kushner decides to abandon the project and lays off most of the staff.
Wildstein goes back to running the New Jersey site.
The 2009 governor’s race is coming up, and Kushner has a very personal interest in that, because Christie is on the ballot.
Kushner harbors a deep antipathy toward the prosecutor who locked up his father, and Wildstein knows how his new boss wants the race to be covered.
“In 2009,” says a former Observer employee, “the site exists to destroy Chris Christie.” When Christie wins, though, the governor is forgiving: He has a job for Wally Edge.
He needs an agent at the Port Authority.
When Wildstein defects, sources say, the Kushners are furious.
Someone leaks Edge’s true identity to the Newark Star-Ledger.
The near-universal reaction among the insiders he covered is: David who?
But Wildstein is known to people who matter, especially Mike DuHaime, now Christie’s chief political strategist.
Wildstein’s new post, at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, comes with a huge salary, by government standards, and the specially created title of director of interstate capital projects.
It quickly becomes evident that Wildstein is not there to build bridges.
“Wildstein has been waiting his whole life to get into a massive government bureaucracy,” says a former colleague, “with all kinds of nooks and crannies and levers.” Why would Christie want to turn David Wildstein into a power broker?
The Port Authority may look like a boring bureaucracy, but it’s really a self-propelled patronage machine.
Every time you cross the Hudson River, or land at one of the region’s airports, or swipe a MetroCard at the World Trade Center transit hub, a coin rings in the Port Authority’s coffers.
It has a 1,700-member police force, an army of engineers and lawyers, and the capacity to spend billions of dollars on construction projects.
The governors of New York and New Jersey jointly control the authority, and the two sides clash eternally.
The New Jersey faction is convinced that it is being cheated out of its fair share of the budget.
Wildstein’s direct boss at the authority is Baroni, his close friend from the Franks campaign, but Wildstein is seen as Christie’s inside man.
(“He came directly — like a missile — out of the governor’s office,” says a former Port Authority executive.)
Wildstein meets frequently with Christie’s advisers, DuHaime and the other Franks-campaign veteran Stepien, and more occasionally with the governor himself.
“When David Wildstein walked into a room, it was clear that Chris Christie was represented,” says Torricelli, who dealt with the Port Authority as an attorney for an auto-importing facility that had a lease dispute with the agency.
“I thought they had rather direct communication.” Wildstein can imagine many creative ways to put the machinery of the Port Authority to use.
(Stepien will later allegedly tell the governor that Wildstein came up with “50 crazy ideas a week.”) And because the Port Authority is an independent agency, Christie can maintain a deniable distance.
When the Port Authority needs to raise tolls, Wildstein and Baroni come up with an elaborate ruse to make it look like Christie is heroically fighting the bureaucracy.
When the city of Bayonne is about to go bankrupt, they orchestrate a land deal that bails it out, removing the burden from Christie.
Inside the authority, Wildstein makes it plain that he is watching out for the governor’s interests.
The civil servants who work at the authority are accustomed to some political interference, but Wildstein’s conduct shocks them.
(“It was extreme,” says a former port official.
“Full intimidation: ‘I’m Christie’s guy.
I rule.’ ”) Co-workers report that Wildstein is seen poking around the office before dawn.
He shows up at meetings he isn’t invited to and begins tapping notes on his tablet.
In an email to an aide, Scott Rechler, a powerful board member from New York, references the widespread concern that Wildstein may be eavesdropping on phone conversations.
Wildstein clashes with the authority’s professional department heads and conspires to purge low-level employees, replacing them with his own people, who are assumed to be spies.
His powers reach into every area: port operations, the airports, the police.
There is a rumor that he uses an emergency-access lane to cut the line every morning at the Lincoln Tunnel.
One day, during a routine tour of the George Washington Bridge, he notices a set of orange cones are blocking off three toll lanes, offering direct access to drivers approaching the bridge from neighboring Fort Lee.
He is annoyed and wants to know why the town appears to have its own entryway.
The bridge’s manager tells him there is a long-standing deal with the mayor.
Wildstein apparently files the observation away.
By 2013, everyone in Christie’s orbit is working toward one objective: the White House.
He is going to run, for sure, and the only question is whether Republicans are ready for a blunt-spoken, sometimes rude northeastern populist with a flair for social media.
Christie first has to get past his reelection campaign in New Jersey, but that’s just a formality.
He’s so popular that the Democrats only put up a token opponent.
In order to demonstrate his centrist appeal, though, Christie’s strategists want to run up the score by winning endorsements from as many Democratic officeholders as possible.
The endorsement push is coordinated by Stepien, Christie’s campaign manager, and Bridget Kelly, a state official who runs the governor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
(The two are also quietly dating.)
The governor’s allies at the Port Authority are key players in their strategy.
Drawing on a list of targeted mayors, Baroni raids a JFK hangar filled with debris from the Twin Towers and distributes pieces of steel to towns around New Jersey for use in memorials.
He and Wildstein conduct so many VIP tours of ground zero that they demand — and receive — a new entry gate for their convenience.
The courtship is not subtle: Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, later recounts that when Wildstein offered his family a tour, he repeatedly referred to Sokolich as “the one I was told to be nice to.” But after hemming and hawing, the mayor eventually makes it clear to Kelly’s office that he’s not going to back the governor.
Soon after, in what prosecutors will describe as an act of political reprisal, Wildstein and Kelly start discussing a scheme.
On August 12, 2013, Kelly checks with her staff one final time to make sure they won’t win Sokolich over.
Early the next morning, she sends Wildstein a terse email.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” “Got it,” Wildstein replies.