Republican Rescue by Chris Christie

Author:Chris Christie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I don’t need a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings or a pile of history books to remind myself about most of this. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been soaking it up. I wasn’t around for Roosevelt, Truman, or Eisenhower. But Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were the bookends of my childhood, and I started volunteering on local Republican campaigns while I was still in high school. I’ve always believed that the right leaders can make things better, and I wanted to be involved. You can learn a lot by just being around, especially in a state as in-your-face as New Jersey, where politics is played in the open and almost nobody is shy. I was inspired by Reagan. I admired the first president Bush and was maddened by Clinton, whose presidency I witnessed through the eyes of a local official on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders—what in any place but New Jersey would be called the county commission. I worked hard to elect George W. Bush as president, serving as counsel for his New Jersey campaign. And I was driven to make public service an even bigger part of my career—to make an even bigger difference.

It was Bush 43, the day before 9/11, who nominated me as the United States attorney, the chief federal prosecutor, for the state of New Jersey. For the next seven years, I made public corruption my top priority, second only to terrorism, winning convictions (usually by guilty plea) against 130 public officials, both Republicans and Democrats, at the state, county, and local levels. The hall of shame included Hudson County executive Robert Janiszewski (bribery), Essex County executive James Treffinger (corruption), former New Jersey Senate president John Lynch (mail fraud and tax evasion), state senator Joe Coniglio (bribery), state assemblyman Mims Hackett (bribery), state senator and former Newark mayor Sharpe James (fraud), and state senator Wayne Bryant (bribery, mail fraud, and wire fraud). I got a reputation for being a no-nonsense prosecutor who was more concerned with right and wrong than right and left. Honestly, it wasn’t too hard to find public corruption in New Jersey, whichever way you looked and whichever era you focused on. What surprised a lot of people was that the state finally had a United States attorney who wouldn’t stand for it.

One case from those years would stick with me more than the others—and not because it was the most serious or the most legally impactful, though it was definitely the most sordid. Like so much else in the public life of New Jersey, the reason it lingered was personal.

The case involved Charles Kushner, a wealthy real estate developer and a generous contributor to New Jersey Democrats. As part of a business dispute with his relatives, the evidence showed that Kushner enlisted a private detective to videotape his sister’s husband having sex with a prostitute, a prostitute he hired for $25,000 and sent to seduce his brother-in-law—then sent the X-rated evidence to his sister. Talk

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.