I suspect we’ll have more on this soon. But there’s some legal jousting which went on today between the lawyer for indicted Bridgegate figure Bridget Kelly and Randy Mastro, the power lawyer from Gibson Dunn who was hired by Gov. Christie’s office to handle the Bridgegate matter for the Governor and prepare the report that exonerated him.
The back and forth has to do with whether Gibson Dunn kept transcripts or audio recordings or any contemporaneous notes of the investigative interviews. Mastro says they didn’t and that (the wording is ambiguous) the contemporaneous notes were later revised into final summaries. Seemingly the original notes were destroyed/edited over and no longer exist.
Kelly’s lawyer doesn’t find that a satisfying answer. And I’m going to defer to more reporting on this who’s on the right side of accepted or common practice.
But what comes out in these filings is something that we basically always knew but which only really seems fully apparent to me now. That is that Mastro – who was paid to do this report by the State of New Jersey – is acting very much like the attorney for Governor Christie, who has an interest in not producing subpoenaed documents, either because requests are over-broad and burdensome or simply because he shouldn’t have to without a clear legal rationale. Those arguments make sense if you’re an advocate for a particular party – as does the kind of document creation and retention protocols which seem engineered to not produce a lot of discoverable documents. But if you’re working on the public dime, those interests and rationales seem much more iffy.
Again, we always knew basically that Mastro was working for Christie, at public expense. But it’s much more out in the open now. And again, it makes one thing crystal clear. Most of the public story about Bridgegate rests on an ‘investigation’ which Christie’s own lawyer did which, surprisingly, exonerated Chris Christie.
