Supreme Court Overturns Convictions In 'Bridgegate' Scandal - NPR

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The U.S. Supreme Court upheld/overturned the conviction of key aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in connection with the "Bridgegate" scandal. Richard Drew/AP hide caption

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Richard Drew/AP

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision Thursday, overturned the fraud conviction of a former top aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who was convicted in 2016 for her role in the so-called "Bridgegate" scandal.

Prosecutors had feared that if the criminal convictions in the case are thrown out, it could strip them of an important tool to prosecute white-collar criminals.

But Christie's former aide Bridget Anne Kelly's lawyers had argued that her actions were driven by a political motive, and while that may not be attractive, it is not fraud. They argued that if Kelly can go to jail for her actions, there is no limit to who could be prosecuted.

The Supreme Court agreed.

"Because the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property, [William] Baroni and Kelly could not have violated the federal-program fraud or wire fraud laws," the court wrote in its unanimous opinion.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, said: "The question presented is whether the defendants committed property fraud. The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing—deception, corruption, abuse of power. But the federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct."

The facts in the case were never in dispute: On the first day in school in 2013, unbeknownst to the public, officials close to Christie ordered the shutdown of two of three access lanes from Fort Lee onto the George Washington Bridge to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse Christie for reelection. The result: chaos.

Christie, a Republican, was not prosecuted, but three public officials close to him — David Wildstein, a top staffer at the Port Authority; William Baroni, the deputy director of the Port Authority; and Kelly, Christie's deputy chief of staff — were convicted of fraud in the scandal.

The jury found that in order to hide the true purpose of the lane closing, Kelly and Baroni created a phony traffic study and assigned public employees to gather information for it. In addition to the money paid to those employees for their time, the government says thousands more in taxpayer funds were paid out to toll collectors on the bridge because of dislocations caused by the lane closing.

Kagan said that Baroni and Kelly's realignment of the access lanes was "an exercise of regulatory power—a reallocation of the lanes between different groups of drivers," and she said that under the court's previous rulings, such a scheme to alter regulatory choice is not a taking of government property.

"While a government's right to its employees' time and labor is a property interest, the prosecution must also show that it is an 'object of fraud,' " she wrote, whereas here the defendants' scheme to reallocate lanes was "an incidental (even if foreseen) byproduct of their" political purpose to cause chaos on the lanes in order to punish the mayor.

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