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A month later, on the first day of school in Fort Lee, Wildstein arrives at the bridge at dawn to supervise the implementation of his plan, which he calls a “traffic study.” All the Port Authority employees involved know something strange and colossally stupid is afoot, but no one says anything, because they are all terrified of Wildstein.
The cones are reconfigured so that Fort Lee’s access is cut to a single lane.
Inside the bridge’s command center, via a live video feed, Wildstein watches as the rush-hour traffic begins to build.
Soon, Fort Lee is totally gridlocked: Buses can’t get children to school.
“Is it wrong that I’m smiling?” Kelly, a divorced mother of four, later texts Wildstein.
“I feel badly about the kids … I guess.” He responds that they are the children of Democrats.
A Port Authority policeman named Chip Michaels texts Wildstein a report from the streets: “Its fkd up here.” Michaels is another guy from Livingston.
He and his brother, a Republican lobbyist, have known both Wildstein and Christie for years.
Michaels picks up Wildstein and takes him on a drive to observe the traffic.
Then they go to a diner, where they have breakfast and discuss Christie’s presidential hopes.
The first day of the traffic pileup.
All right, so now it’s September 11, the most solemn day of the whole political calendar, and Chris Christie — the candidate who never neglects to mention he was appointed U.S. Attorney the day before the terrorist attacks — is yukking it up with Wildstein at the World Trade Center site.
They’re there for the annual memorial service, but it’s also the third day of the closures, and Wildstein has been monitoring the traffic, along with Mayor Sokolich’s increasingly desperate messages to Baroni.
(“Radio silence,” Wildstein orders.)
Photos of the event show Wildstein standing next to the governor, checking his phone, and sharing a hearty laugh with Christie, Baroni, and others.
No one knows what’s so funny, but Wildstein will later allege that they discussed the bridge.
It is the last time he and the governor will see each other in person, at least publicly.
By the next day, Sokolich and others in Fort Lee are screaming about public safety and political payback.
The “Road Warrior” columnist for the Bergen Record contacts the Port Authority about the mysterious gridlock, and Wildstein forwards the message to Kelly, who is heading down the shore with the governor, responding to a major fire on the Seaside boardwalk.
No one knows what she tells Christie, but the lane closures continue.
The Record column draws the attention of the Port Authority’s executive director, Pat Foye, a New York appointee.
This is the first he’s heard of a “traffic study,” and he freaks out.
He orders the lanes reopened, saying the “hasty and ill-advised” closure is both dangerous and illegal.
A couple of weeks later, the email from Foye makes its way to reporter Ted Mann at The Wall Street Journal.
Wildstein presumes Foye is waging factional warfare, rather than worrying about ambulances and school buses stuck in traffic.
“Holy shit, who does he think he is, Capt.
America?” Stepien texts Wildstein.
“Bad guy,” Wildstein says.
“Welcome to our world.” The Christie administration brushes aside accusations of its involvement in causing the gridlock as an absurd conspiracy theory, but the Journal continues to pursue the story, and other outlets follow.
Legislative hearings are called, subpoenas are issued, and the governor and his aides hold crisis-management meetings.
As late as December 2, Christie is still trying to laugh off suggestions of retaliation.
“I worked the cones, actually,” he says sarcastically at a press conference.
“Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there in overalls and a hat.” One day, Wildstein disappears from his office at the Port Authority headquarters, never to return.
He can hear the cellos.
In early December, the dormant Wikipedia account Montclair0055 — whose sparse prior contributions include creating a page for the state senator who gave Wildstein his first paying job at age 12 and laudatory additions to the entries for Baroni and DuHaime — stirs to life.
As the clamor of the investigation intensifies, ­Montclair0055 writes late into the night on subjects that mirror Wildstein’s obsessions, adding a critical entry for an obscure Democratic Party hack who was one of Wally Edge’s favorite targets and another about “the Curse of the 38th,” a phrase (used exclusively on PoliticsNJ) to describe the voting history of a Bergen County legislative district.
The editor revises the page of Steve Kornacki to note that he got his start at PoliticsNJ.
Montclair0055 seems determined to ensure that the picaresque characters and episodes that so enthralled Wildstein are preserved for posterity.
Many of the contributions are later deleted by other Wikipedia editors on the grounds of insignificance.
The night of December 4, Wildstein has dinner in New Brunswick with his friend Mike Drewniak, the governor’s spokesman, and tells him that Christie was aware of the lane closings as they were happening.
The message is implicit: He won’t go down alone.
The governor’s chief counsel calls Wildstein and tells him his resignation is required immediately.
Wildstein’s subpoena from the state legislative committee arrives on December 12, and he hires a criminal-defense attorney.
They could fight to quash it, but instead he hands over 900 pages of emails, texts, and documents.
One of those emails is the fateful one from Kelly: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Those eight words are all it takes to ruin several lives.
You can imagine Christie, the former prosecutor, wondering: Why didn’t she just use the goddamn phone?
His reputation as an incorruptible truth-teller is rendered ridiculous.
Even his hero Bruce Springsteen, in a hilarious knife-twisting gesture, duets with Jimmy Fallon on Late Night in a song about the traffic jam set to the tune of “Born to Run.”* Christie holds a two-hour press conference, in which he says he was “blindsided” and “humiliated” by the actions of his staff.
“Let me just clear something up, okay, about my childhood friend David Wildstein,” he says scornfully.
“We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school.
You know, I was the class president and athlete.
I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.” Christie’s office later circulates a memo to supporters that describes Wildstein as untrustworthy, citing, among other things, the high-school dispute with his social-studies teacher and his odd habit of registering web addresses for the names of his enemies.
In January 2015, Wildstein reaches a deal to plead guilty and testify.
Baroni and Kelly are indicted four months later.
Christie decides to run for president anyway.
He announces his candidacy at Livingston High School.
Inside a sweltering gym bedecked with championship banners, the governor is received by a boisterous contingent of his old friends from the class of 1980.
“Lots of people have asked me over the course of last week, why here?” he says.
“Why here?
Because everything started here for me.
The confidence.
The education.
The friends.
The family.
And the love that I’ve always felt for and from this community.” Outside the gym, protesters picket the speech, waving signs that read BULLY.
On the campaign trail, he keeps getting incredulous questions about the juvenile traffic-jam prank.
He drops out after a poor finish in New Hampshire and endorses Donald Trump.
This puts him in the awkward company of the nominee’s son-in-law and strategic adviser, Jared Kushner.
Kushner finally bests his father’s accuser, crushing Christie’s hopes of the vice-presidential nomination, but Christie still retains an important place in Trump’s small circle of loyalists.
If Trump wins, you can assume there will be a place for him in the administration, perhaps as attorney general.
That prospect must make Wildstein extremely nervous.
After the scandal, he moves to Florida, sells the house in Montville, and loses a precipitous amount of weight.
When he arrives at court to enter his guilty plea, the reporters covering the case hardly recognize him.
By the terms of his deal with prosecutors, he is expected to be the star witness against Kelly and Baroni, who, if convicted, would likely face two to three years in prison.
It is rumored that their trial will bring significant further disclosures.
Wildstein, the collector of secrets, is said to have walked out of the Port Authority with an enormous amount of documentary evidence, including the hard drive to his former friend Baroni’s computer.
Looming over the trial is the question of Christie’s level of involvement in his old classmate’s crazy bridge idea.
Prosecutors have filed a sealed memorandum, listing people who were aware of the scheme; it is widely presumed that Christie’s name is on it.
If he is called to testify, the governor will have to tell his story under oath.
At a minimum, the spectacle will be embarrassing for Christie and threatening to any future chance of a cabinet post.
At worst, the trial could destroy what is left of a career he’d once thought could plausibly culminate in the presidency.
Among veteran observers of New Jersey politics, there is an ongoing debate about who is most to blame for Chris Christie’s downfall.
There are essentially two theories.
One holds that Christie, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to authorize a retaliatory traffic jam.
The other holds that Wildstein, a seemingly intelligent adult, would never be so idiotic as to go forward with his scheme without Christie’s approval.
The trial is scheduled to begin on September 19.
Soon we may hear the rest of the tale and, at long last, get the joke.
*This article appears in the September 19, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.
*This article has been corrected to reflect that Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon performed a song about the traffic closure on Late Night, not SNL or The Tonight Show.
The College Football Playoff committee released its first rankings to great fanfare.
The list is sensible, with proper credit given to teams with good wins and/or acceptable losses, and there is a pretty obvious explanation for why and where these rankings differ from, say, the AP Poll or F/+ rankings.
Ole Miss ranks three spots higher via the committee, thanks both to the win over Alabama and, in theory, a lower level of recency bias (the Rebels lost just last week) in the committee room.
TCU ranks three spots higher than in the AP poll, potentially because it wasn't dragged down by preseason rankings.
Notre Dame, lacking any sort of marquee win, ranks four spots lower than in the AP poll.
We'll see how things like recency and conference leads factor moving forward.
I still feel it's misguided for the committee to put out weekly updates.
It serves no purpose but to open up opportunities for unexplained movement and criticism.
Still, this was a pretty good start.
Now let's figure out what to expect moving forward.
*** Each Wednesday, I've been using the F/+ rankings and the win probabilities derived from them to peer into the future a bit.