The prosecution of Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni has just begun in the George Washington Bridge saga, but the two have already made part of their legal strategy clear: Neither is stupid enough to have closed lanes at the bridge to punish Fort Lee's mayor. And the government's key witness is a liar.
Kelly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's former deputy chief of staff, and Baroni, a former Christie appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, pleaded not guilty in federal court here Monday to charges in a nine-count criminal indictment unsealed Friday by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.
The witness, David Wildstein, who served under Baroni at the Port Authority, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiring to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, for failing to endorse Republican Gov. Christie for re-election in 2013.
U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton set a July 7 trial date for the two, who were ordered to surrender their passports and released on $150,000 bail each.
Kelly and Baroni were charged with conspiring to intentionally misuse the property of an organization that receives more than $10,000 in federal money; following through with that conspiracy; four counts of wire fraud; conspiring to injure the residents of Fort Lee by restricting their travel on public roadways without a legitimate government objective, in violation of their civil rights; and depriving Fort Lee residents of those rights.
Minutes after Fishman held a news conference announcing the charges, Baroni's lawyers stood outside the courthouse Friday and said their client's career in public service had been "marked by integrity and a nonpartisan pursuit of the common good."
"By contrast, no one disputes that David Wildstein is a criminal and a liar," attorney Mike Baldassare told reporters, adding that Wildstein had duped Baroni, his friend of more than 10 years, into thinking the lane closures were part of a traffic study.
Baroni, a former GOP state senator who resigned as deputy executive director of the Port Authority in December 2013, said after his court appearance Monday that he had spent his career "trying to do the right thing."
He cited his support of legislation to legalize gay marriage and medical marijuana and to initiate paid family leave _ causes that weren't popular in his party.
"Those are the things you do risk your career over," he said. "I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation, for something like this. I am an innocent man."
Kelly, too, has tried to rebut the image portrayed of her in court documents as a bad actor, calling herself a "qualified, hardworking woman" and mother of four who worked for the state for more than 20 years.
She said it was an "absurd thought to believe that a member of the governor's staff could close the George Washington Bridge." She said Wildstein was lying.
Her attorney, Michael Critchley, acknowledged Monday that some of the allegations were sensational _ "Is it wrong that I am smiling?" Kelly texted Wildstein after Sokolich complained of "total gridlock" _ but said Kelly's innocence would become clear once a fuller picture of the evidence emerged.
Critchley said he would subpoena Kelly's former colleagues in the governor's office if prosecutors didn't call on them. Asked whether that would include Christie, he said he would "subpoena anybody who I feel necessary to establish my client's innocence."
Joseph A. Hayden Jr., a New Jersey criminal defense lawyer and former state deputy attorney general, said he believed "both lawyers will vigorously attack the integrity and motivation of Wildstein by pointing out prior lies, prior fraud, and his motivation for a lesser sentence."
"Because, remember, whatever actually happened at Bridgegate, he did it. He was the one on the scene."
The indictment alleges that Wildstein, Kelly and Baroni conspired to close two of three lanes leading from Fort Lee, Bergen County, to the bridge from Sept. 9 to 13, 2013, to punish the mayor.
"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," Kelly wrote Wildstein about a month earlier.
"Got it," he replied.
They ignored Sokolich's pleas for help after Fort Lee was stuck in gridlock, prosecutors say, and covered up their actions with a "sham story" that the lane closures were part of a traffic study.
To enact the plan, prosecutors say, the three needed to enlist the help of unwitting Port Authority employees for such tasks as removing traffic cones that separated the lanes and providing bogus explanations to reporters.
This misuse of resources at the Port Authority, a bistate agency that receives more than $10,000 annually in federal money, a legal threshold, violated federal law, the indictment says.
"That's what gives us a federal hook in this case over that crime," Fishman said at a news conference Friday.
He said prosecutors had invoked the statute in other public-corruption cases, including against former Newark Mayor Sharpe James.
"It's a statute to which we frequently turn in matters of corruption," Fishman said, "because Congress decided that it was really important to make it a crime of federal jurisdiction if people take resources, money, bribes, things for their benefit or for the benefit of other people, from state and local agencies that get federal money."
The government doesn't need to prove Kelly and Baroni were aware of the statute, said L. George Parry, a former federal and Philadelphia prosecutor not connected to the case.
"The government only has to show they took these actions intentionally, and if those actions constitute a violation of the law," he said, "then that completes the job of the prosecutor."
Hayden, also not connected to the case, said that prosecutors usually invoke the statute in bribery cases and that defense lawyers likely would challenge its applicability here.
Perhaps less convincing, one former prosecutor said, is a second charge, that Kelly and Wildstein conspired to deprive Fort Lee residents of their civil rights, "namely, the right to localized travel on public roadways free from restrictions unrelated to legitimate government objectives."
"That's a reach," said Peter Vaira, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, also not linked to the case.
He said the law was usually invoked in cases involving, for example, voting rights.
The indictment, referring to the electronic exchanges among them, also alleges that Kelly and Baroni, along with Wildstein and "others," committed wire fraud in furtherance of their scheme.
The "others" refer to unindicted co-conspirators. Fishman wouldn't name them and said he didn't plan to bring charges against anyone else in the bridge scheme given the evidence currently available to him.
"As of now," Parry said, "all of the evidence indicates Governor Christie didn't know anything about what was to happen. But Bridget Kelly and (Baroni) are now charged. And they're going to have to examine their positions and decide if they want to cut a deal with the government," assuming they have information to offer prosecutors about Christie or other superiors.
Kelly said Friday that it would be "ludicrous" to think she was "the only person in the governor's office who was aware of the George Washington Bridge issue."
(Inquirer staff writer Maddie Hanna contributed to this article.)
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