In 2019, the former Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of New Jersey received a sentence of thirteen months incarceration in federal prison for her role in the notorious Bridgegate scandal. In 2013, Bridget Kelly worked with other officials to shut down lanes on the George Washington Bridge. This created massive delays for commuters. Their intent, according to Politico, was to punish the mayor of a local town, Fort Lee. He had declined to endorse Governor Chris Christie’s re-election campaign.
Her co-defendant, Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was sentenced to eighteen months of federal prison time. Another collaborator and former Port Authority executive, David Wildstein, testified against them at the trial in exchange for a term of probation.
“Bridget Anne Kelly — author of the now infamous email, “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” — insisted she was innocent and said Christie deserved to be punished, not her. She called him a “bully” and said he, among others, was able to “escape justice.””
Christie was not indicted. Kelly’s defence relied upon the notion that Christie was involved, however oblique his moral force in driving this act.
“When he was sentenced two months ago in the same Newark courtroom, Baroni apologized for what he had done, and he blamed the “cult and culture” of Chris Christie, saying he simply “wanted to be on the team” and “wanted to please him.”
“Kelly said she doesn’t know if there was a Christie cult — nor does she know if Christie was aware of the true purpose of the lane closures as they happened — but she says “there was definitely an environment” around the famously bombastic governor.
““People talked about the one-constituent rule, which David referred to in court,” she said in the interview, alluding to Wildstein. “Everybody knew that. Christie was a commanding leader in a sense, both of his staff and obviously of the state, to certain degrees. It was an environment where I was very surprised by how involved the chief executive was with the day-to-day functioning of the office.””
Given Kelly’s allegations, it might be reasonable to ask, what did Christie know and when did he know it?
It is interesting that she thinks he is guilty even if Christie was ignorant of the actual motivation for the lane closures. The implausible cover story was that this was some sort of traffic study.
What she suggests is that people working for Christie performed these criminal acts for Christie’s benefit. He is the sole constituent. They did these things because they knew what Christie wanted (representing motive) and they had the tools to disrupt people’s lives in a manner that would help obtain the Governor’s desired objectives (representing opportunity).
This smacks of racketeering, but for the fact that what Kelly and her cronies did is not obviously one of the thirty-five specified “rackets” in the statute. But it does speak to the rationale at the core of the RICO law. See this explanation.
“The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, passed by the United States Congress on October 15, 1970, was revolutionary. Prior to the RICO Act, Federal prosecutors were unable to legally tie organized crime leaders to those committing the crimes. By passing RICO, those ordering crimes could be prosecuted along with those committing the crimes on their behalf. Furthermore, the RICO Act was designed to specifically target known organized crime such that 35 specific offenses were listed as elements for prosecution.”
We can infer from Kelly’s post-sentencing dithyramb that the decision to punish the mayor of Fort Lee with the contrived shut-down of lanes at the traffic plaza for the bridge during rush hour was intended to benefit one person: Chris Christie. If so, we might describe the act as political extortion and abuse of power. Her complaint that Christie should have felt the wrath of the judicial system is what suggests the similarity to racketeering. RICO laws enabled the federal government to target the heads of organized crime syndicates for crimes committed by their confederates, either with or without the knowledge of the leadership, but for the benefit of those Dons at the top.
Kelly’s argument is that she is a single mother-of-four who is taking the fall for the boss. And she’s not happy about it.
Those in positions of power have more than a bully pulpit to speak up. They have a bully’s perch from which to intimidate anyone who gets in their way.
Left unchecked, we would expect this to happen more frequently. It also suggests that people in positions of leadership need to obsess about the words they use in public and in private lest these comments be misconstrued as instructions to abuse the power of the office.
Here is Brendan Carr, a Republican Commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, in a tweet.
“President Biden stood at a White House podium & stated that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.” When asked "How?", President Biden responded “There’s a lot of ways.” There certainly are. The DOJ, FAA, FTC, NLRB, SDNY, & FWS have all acted. The FCC now joins them.”
By this argument, all it took was a throwaway, dog-whistle comment from President Biden suggesting that a political opponent was fair game. It was Musk who bought Twitter. It was Musk who opened it up to scrutiny by independent journalists. It was Musk who redesigned Twitter’s censorship practices and voided much of its associated collaboration with the federal government.
Here is Carr’s dissent to the FCC’s decision to revoke an award of $885 million that the Commission had made previously to Musk’s Starlink. Starlink would have used the funds to provide high-speed Internet service to rural homes and businesses via satellite, bypassing the uneconomic process of building out other types of broadband connectivity such as fiber.
The WSJ was scathing in its description.
“The FCC’s new 3-2 Democratic majority on Tuesday nonetheless revoked Starlink’s funding because it hasn’t met its commitment to connect 640,000 rural Americans two years ahead of schedule. Yet the law merely requires Starlink to show it is “reasonably capable” of providing high-speed internet to at least 40% of the roughly 640,000 rural premises by the end of 2025. Starlink filed voluminous documents with the agency in 2021 and 2022 demonstrating it could reach this benchmark. The FCC has never before required that a funding recipient meet its obligations years early.
“Democratic commissioners simply ignored them. They claim the company isn’t making fast enough progress, though other funding recipients aren’t any further along. The Democratic majority justifies its disparate treatment of Starlink by claiming it is relying on an unproven technology. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky would surely disagree.”
The reference to Zelensky is to the proof that Starlink is a vital part of the Ukrainian war effort, succeeding under combat conditions.
You might wonder how Musk could warrant investigation by the Fish and Wildlife Service. This was an environmental review of the launch facility in partnership with the FAA. Here is Space News:
“The second Starship launch was “after months of delay stemming from bureaucratic red tape from AST, Fish and Wildlife and other agencies injecting themselves into the process,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, at a Dec. 13 hearing by that committee’s space subcommittee. AST is the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
“Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, told Cruz the environmental review ahead of the second launch was required “to ensure compliance with NEPA” and related environmental laws. “We conducted that consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service in accordance with U.S. law.””
It is not just SpaceX. Musk’s Twitter is being investigated by the FTC, the NLRB, and the DOJ, not to mention his public sparring matches with the SEC. Tesla has tussled with the NLRB.
As John Cochrane writes in the Grumpy Economist:
“Show me the man, and I’ll find the crime. Three felonies a day.
“In the same vein, I found most interesting in the twitter files and scathing Missouri V. Biden decision the question, just how did the government force tech companies to censor the government's political opponents? "Nice business you have there. It would be a shame if the alphabet soup agencies had to look into it." “
Of course, it could be the case that Musk deserves this inquisition on parallel fronts. But the legitimacy of the investigations is weakened by the implication that this might be retribution stemming from the prior dog-whistle.
This bureaucratic racketeering is the opposite of regulatory capture: “Regulatory capture occurs when the regulatory agencies created to protect the interests of consumers work to safeguard the commercial or political interests of the companies they are expected to be regulating.” Instead, bureaucratic racketeering occurs when the regulatory agencies created to protect the interests of consumers work to safeguard or advance the political interests of bureaucratic or political actors, often at the expense of the public good and the companies being regulated.
This phenomenon is pernicious to governance and democratic rule in that it permits officials, both elected and unelected, to pervert the bureaucratic power of the agencies they oversee for their own ends. It enables venal ambition to subordinate the will of the people. It is a step beyond the deep state’s exercise of personal interest in dictating policy. At least, one can hope, the deep state actors act in good faith to obtain better public ends than their political masters who suffer from shorter time horizons and inferior domain expertise. Bureaucratic racketeering is outright debasement of the public interest in favor of personal interest, albeit suffused with a misbegotten conflation of what is good for the man and what is good for the people. It is the ultimate in “waste, fraud, and abuse” yet it is not policed in a consistent fashion.
We can imagine future Presidents composing what Nixon called an “enemies list” and leveraging the power of the state to attack those who would oppose them.
Would they feel emboldened by precedent?