Just days away from an expected smashing re-election victory in New Jersey, a new book portrays Gov. Chris Christie as an opposition researcher’s dream.
In “Double Down: Game Change 2012″, Mitt Romney’s vice presidential vetting team is portrayed as hostile to Christie due to a litany of troubling issues in his past that haven’t previously received sustained attention.
An excerpt of the book chronicling the 2012 campaign quotes Romney adviser Ted Newton saying, “When you look below the surface, it’ not pretty.”
This graph summarizes the red flags that disturbed Romney’s team and ultimately dissuaded them from favoring Christie for vice president:
The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on Myers’ team: Christie’s other lobbying clients, his investments overseas, the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament, and the status of his health.
Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again, according to “Double Down.”
At campaign stops Friday, Christie waved off the claims as an attempt to sell books.
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