Bridge Scandal Has Become Thorny Issue for Another Governor: Cuomo
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Version 1 of 3. The monumental traffic jam at the foot of the George Washington Bridge was never supposed to be Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s problem. “I don’t know anything more than basically what has been in the newspaper, because it was basically a New Jersey issue,” Mr. Cuomo told an interviewer in December 2013, as though his curiosity stopped at the state line. His comment came three months after aides to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey closed two of the three access lanes to the bridge in Fort Lee, N.J., apparently to punish a mayor who had declined to endorse Mr. Christie. As the federal trial of two of Mr. Christie’s allies in the bridge scandal churns toward a verdict, however, the Hudson River has not proven to be an especially effective moat. Trial testimony has suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, worked with Mr. Christie, a Republican, to manage the fallout from the lane closings, as the controversy widened from local headache to national scandal — perhaps, as some longtime observers of the two governors have said, to protect Mr. Christie’s re-election bid that year and to buoy Mr. Cuomo’s own the next. (Mr. Cuomo’s aides have denied participating in any cover-up.) Three separate witnesses have recounted at least one phone conversation between the two governors. Emails among their aides have offered flashes of the damage-control campaign waged in Trenton, Albany and the offices of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the bridge. And Mr. Cuomo’s claim that he was no more than a passive observer has wilted under growing evidence of his watchful eye. The New York side has offered scant refuge to Mr. Cuomo. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged three of his former top aides and advisers in a corruption scandal, forcing a retrenchment of one of his signature policies: an economic development program that was meant to turbocharge upstate New York’s economy, but whose most visible fruit has been the enrichment of Mr. Cuomo’s former aides and political donors. Yet as two scandals have lapped at Mr. Cuomo’s feet, the governor has plowed ahead, meeting little resistance along the way. He has vowed to forge ahead with plans to inject upstate New York with hundreds of millions of dollars in state economic development funds. He has campaigned, with newfound enthusiasm, for Democrats running for the State Senate, who have enthusiastically accepted his endorsement. His approval ratings, as measured in Siena College polls in September and October, have lingered at 57 percent and 56 percent, slightly up from the summer. “None of this appears to have had an impact on voters’ view of the governor,” Steve Greenberg, a pollster for Siena College, said. “We’re in the midst of a presidential election. It’s all kinds of craziness going on, and that’s what voters are most focused on.” It has been left to New York’s beleaguered Republicans, facing a potential rout in the presidential election and a possible loss of control of the State Senate, to try to make something stick. After one witness testified to Mr. Cuomo’s involvement in the bridge scandal, the chairman of the state Republican Party, Edward F. Cox, said in a statement the trial had revealed that “he sacrificed the commuters of his state and participated in a cover-up to serve his own political interests.” By last week, the state Republicans had released an online ad, titled “Cuomo’s Web of Corruption,” tying him to both scandals. The Republicans have been among the few to voice the suspicion that Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Christie each saw an upside in cooling the furor surrounding the bridge scandal. Although the governors are of opposing political parties, they have repeatedly found mutual benefit in cooperating on issues like the Ebola scare in 2014. That year, when Mr. Cuomo ran for re-election, Mr. Christie, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, all but abandoned the Republican candidate, Rob Astorino, saying that the group would not “invest in lost causes.” “It was just so painfully obvious,” Jessica A. Proud, a Republican strategist and spokeswoman for Mr. Cox, said. “It was like, finally the truth comes out,” she said of the bridge trial. The governor’s aides have treated Republican attacks with scorn. “It’s a feeble attempt by Ed Cox and his cronies to distract from their corruption issues and uncomfortable questions about their support for Donald Trump,” a spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, said on Sunday. With Mr. Cuomo’s well-documented aversion to paper trails — he is known not to use email, and his aides tend to communicate through BlackBerry messages — he rarely finds himself in the kind of deeply uncomfortable position that the bridge trial has forced him into: stuck between his own public statements and trial testimony that has given the public the most detailed, intimate and colorful view yet of fall 2013. Mr. Cuomo’s appointees to the Port Authority first got involved when Patrick J. Foye, the Cuomo appointee who served as the agency’s executive director, found out about the lane closings and ordered them reopened, calling them “hasty and ill advised.” In October, a month after the lanes were closed, an email from Scott Rechler, a Cuomo ally who served as the authority’s vice chairman, suggested that the governor was monitoring what Mr. Foye would say about the lane closings at a Port Authority public board meeting. “Gov just called, but I figured I will call him after the meeting in case Pat does anything different,” Mr. Rechler wrote to an aide. Mr. Rechler and two other witnesses have testified that as the scandal grew, the two governors spoke by phone to discuss the lane closings, and that Mr. Christie complained to Mr. Cuomo that Mr. Foye’s interference was inflaming the situation. Another witness, David Wildstein, a former Christie ally who has pleaded guilty to ordering the lane closings while at the Port Authority, testified that other Christie appointees had told him that the governors agreed to have the Port Authority issue a report claiming that the lane closings had been part of a “traffic study.” He also said he believed that at Mr. Christie’s behest, Mr. Cuomo had told Mr. Foye to stay quiet until after Mr. Christie had safely won re-election. (Mr. Wildstein’s involvement in the scandal did not become public until the day after Mr. Christie was re-elected.) Under questioning from prosecutors, Mr. Wildstein acknowledged he did not have direct knowledge of the conversation, leading Mr. Cuomo’s aides to dismiss his testimony as “false, thirdhand gossip.” Mr. Cuomo took the same tack, telling reporters the next day, “We have the advantage of knowing it is factually not true, because Pat Foye did not stand down.” No traffic study report appeared. Mr. Foye has said through a lawyer that he was never asked to conceal or ignore the matter. Mr. Rechler testified that Mr. Cuomo never told him how to handle Trenton’s complaints about Mr. Foye. Yet one former Christie aide on trial, Bridget Anne Kelly, testified that Mr. Christie bragged during a conference call with his top aides, including Ms. Kelly, that he had told Mr. Cuomo to tell Mr. Foye to back off, using a vulgarity. After The Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 12 about a conversation between the two governors, both men quickly denied that they had discussed Mr. Foye. Asked a few days later whether he believed the claim that the closings were part of a traffic study, Mr. Cuomo said, “I’m sure it is as Governor Christie says it is.” Mr. Cuomo’s aides have moved swiftly to counter the narrative that has emerged from news reports and from the trial, with each successive denial more narrowly tailored than the last. Mr. Cuomo initially claimed only a passing knowledge of the closings. When the public radio station WNYC published emails showing the governor and one of his top aides had closely monitored the scandal, a spokesman said it was “exactly what should be done.” After Mr. Wildstein’s testimony, a spokesman insisted that “no such conversation between the governors happened.” After Mr. Rechler testified that the two governors had discussed Mr. Foye’s interference, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo denied that there had been a plan to cover up the scandal, but acknowledged that the men had discussed the bridge — a well-known fact, he said. In December 2014, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Christie rejected a unanimous vote by their state Legislatures to pass a bill overhauling the Port Authority, agreeing instead to accept the recommendations of a special panel they had jointly formed. As Mr. Christie’s reputation was repeatedly flayed in federal court this month, Mr. Cuomo declined to pile on. “It’s not my place to tell him what to do,” he said at the Columbus Day parade on Oct. 10, after reporters asked him if Mr. Christie should abandon Mr. Trump, for whom he has served as a prominent surrogate. “I leave New Jersey to him and his politics to him, and he leaves New York to me.” |