On a conference call with reporters just now, the Christie camp tried to hammer Jon Corzine over potential political conflicts from his charitable donations — and ended up getting grilled by reporters about whether Michele Brown, Christie’s former aide in the U.S. Attorney’s office, may have been illegally helping his campaign.
This came after a Star-Ledger report that Corzine had donated $87,000, from his charitable foundation and his own personal accounts, to the church of Rev. Reginald Jackson in Orange, New Jersey. Jackson denies that his endorsement of Corzine is connected to the donations, despite Christie’s agreement on Jackson’s big issue of charter schools: “In this particular race between Corzine and Chris Christie, if there are 10 issues, Jon Corzine and I are in agreement on nine of them. Chris Christie and I probably agree on three of them. It was a very difficult decision to make.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Michele Brown, who remained in the U.S Attorney’s office after Christie stepped down, interceded to handle the Corzine campaign’s Freedom Of Information Act requests for Christie’s record, and also allegedly urged the office to take action quickly on local corruption arrests in order to benefit Christie’s campaign. Brown later resigned from the office, after it was revealed that she’d received an undisclosed $46,000 personal loan from Christie in 2007. Brown told the Times that the latest allegations are “outrageous and inaccurate.”
On the call, GOP state Sen. Joe Kyrillos criticized Corzine for not being more forthcoming with the records of his charitable donations: “We have 14 days before the election. Normally when people are generous, they do philanthropy, they’re proud of that fact. There’s no secret, the governor spends a lot of his fortune — some of it on very good works and people and organizations. And yet he doesn’t want people to know. There must be a reason he doesn’t want people to know that information.”
Regarding Rev. Jackson, Kyrillos said “I know he thought long and hard about endorsing Chris Christie,” because of Jackson’s advocacy of charter schools. As for any implication that the endorsement and the donations were linked, Kyrillos was careful to add that he was not making any accusations: “I wouldn’t say that about Reggie Jackson. I don’t think Chris would say that about Reggie Jackson. But let the people know about it.”
During the question and answer session, every single question centered around Michele Brown. As an example of an inaccuracy in the story, the Christie campaign said the story talks about a $73 charge to the U.S. Attorney’s office for a drive to Philadelphia for a Phillies-Mets game. They said this was an annual office outing, and that the Times story didn’t mention this key detail.
Campaign adviser Mike DuHaime said of the darker allegations involving Michele Brown: “I think a story by unnamed sources, two weeks out from the campaign, making allegations which are untrue, really — I don’t think there’s a lot of credence to that story, and it’s something I wasn’t expecting two weeks out from the New York Times, and I don’t think anyone was expecting it.”
Campaign spokesperson Maria Comella was asked what specific details of the story would be refuted.”Look at the nature of this story. It’s based on unnamed sources making rather broad sweeping accusations,” said Comella. “And at the end of the day, this is a story, which I don’t think we’re gonna get into tick-tock in terms of everything it goes through, because we’ve been very clear about his record as U.S. Attorney, how he handled the office, and that speaks for itself.”
DuHaime dismissed the accusation that Brown interfered with the processing of the FOIA requests. “The allegation that somehow the timeline was affected seems to be just that — an allegation,” said DuHaime, also adding that the Times story “leaves you with an impression that is, in my opinion, inaccurate.”
Kyrillos also said that Christie has not gone into the gutter on this campaign — for example, he has not brought up how Jon Corzine’s marriage ended years ago when he had an affair with the then-head of the state public employees union: “You have just not seen Chris Christie get into the gutter. People have begged him, for example, to get into Carla Katz. And he’s said, ‘don’t talk about it.’ I’m just bringing it up, just bringing it up, as areas that could have been pursued and were not talked about.”
