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Christie's biggest step in scoring points in his inner-party circles as a loyal apparatchik was a plan to empower bank swindler Dwek with federal funds to set up defendants in "Bid Rig III" (a code term devised by law enforcement) in a sting operation.
Earlier, Dwek bilked banks out of $50 million and ran a cruise ship brothel in the Caribbean, according to court testimony this year and last.
Christie's DOJ filed criminal charges and worked out a deal for him to help create new cases. As part of this, the feds provided Dwek with funds to donate to local campaigns. He and his associates then gathered evidence that recipients were responding in a fashion that could prompt bribery and honest-services types of criminal charges.
In a potential violation of the Hatch Act, Christie twice sought political advice from Rove about a gubernatorial run, according to Rove's 2009 congressional testimony.
Christie resigned from the U.S. attorney's office in December 2008 following the GOP presidential defeat. But first he made two key promotions to establish the office's leadership. He promoted his First Assistant Ralph Marra to become acting U.S. attorney, putting in place the office leader who would finish Bid Rig III.
Ralph J. Marra by U.S. Justice Department
Christie also promoted his assistant Michele Brown, to whom he'd secretly loaned $46,000, to take Mara's place as the number two executive in the office.
Christie was soon boasting at a 2009 campaign event in West Windsor, NJ that he was still in contact with staff from his old office and would be bringing some to Trenton:
You know, we're going to ferret out waste and fraud and abuse in government. I think you know I'll do that better than anybody. I've got a group of U.S. Attorneys sitting down in Newark still doing their jobs. But let me tell you, they are watching the newspapers.
And after we win this election, I'm going to take a whole group of them to Trenton and put them in every one of the departments because they saw a lot of waste and abuse being investigated while we were in the U.S. Attorney's office that didn't rise to the level of a crime. So I told them, the good news is, when we get to Trenton, we don't have to worry about beyond a reasonable doubt anymore.
As promised, Christie has filled the U.S. attorney's office with what we should call "Loyal Christies." A New York Times investigation later reported that Brown seemed instrumental in DOJ efforts resisting news media requests for Christie's travel records.
Then the records were released. "They showed," the Times said, "the U.S. attorney often stayed at expensive hotels on the taxpayers' dime, routinely exceeding per diem rates set for Justice Department officials." Further, the newspaper reported that Brown accompanied Christie on 16 trips, the bulk of them in 2007 and 2008. The trips included one to London and another to a Las Vegas convention, sometimes accompanied by family or other staff.
Michele Brown by U.S. Justice Department
The Loyal Christies operated in an Obama-led Justice Department, and orchestrated on July 23, 2009 a press conference to showcase one of the largest indictments in New Jersey history just as the 2009 election season was heating up.
Roughly half of the 44 suspects were local political figures, with the other suspects in such non-political crimes as money-laundering. All but one of the political suspects were Democrats, according to defense sources. Under his successor Marra, prosecutorsworked with Dwek to grab headlines with one of the largest mass indictmentsinstate history on July 23, 2009.
Harper's columnist Scott Horton saw the case immediately as part of an ongoing nationwide scandal of Bush DOJ political prosecutions that he'd been tracking elsewhere. His Manure for the Garden State 13 months ago argued that the prosecution was highly suspect.
