In the midst of a growing furor over the closing of two of three toll lanes on the George Washington Bridge last September, David Wildstein, the Port Authority’s then-director of interstate capital projects, sent a message to Gov. Chris Christie staffer Bridget Anne Kelly saying the executive director of the Port Authority had ordered that the lanes be reopened.
“We are appropriately going nuts,” wrote Wildstein. “Samson helping us retaliate.”
With that email, David Samson, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, suddenly came into sharp focus — at first over what he may have known about the scandal at the bridge, and then over growing conflict of interest concerns involving millions in Port Authority contracts that benefited his law firm.
While not implicated in the scandal, Samson never publicly answered questions about the email. He refused to be interviewed by a former federal prosecutor hired by Christie to get to the bottom of the fiasco. He hired two lawyers to represent him, as the state Legislature and the U.S. Attorney’s Office began issuing subpoenas for Port Authority records.
And after continuing calls for his ouster, and the release of an internal report to the governor earlier in the week recommending a complete restructuring of the powerful bistate agency, Samson finally walked away on Friday, calling Christie to tell him he was resigning, effective immediately.
