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Chris Christie

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Christopher James "Chris" Christie (born September 6, 1962) is the 55th and current Governor of New Jersey. Upon his election to the governorship in November 2009, Christie became the first Republican to win a statewide election in New Jersey in 12 years. Christie, an attorney, previously served as United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. He resides in Mendham Township, New Jersey, having chosen as many previous governors have, not to move his family into Drumthwacket, the official governor's mansion.

Early life and family

Chris Christie was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Bill and Sondra Christie. He was raised in Livingston, graduating from Livingston High School. Christie graduated from the University of Delaware with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science in 1984 and Seton Hall University School of Law with a Juris Doctor degree in 1987. Christie was admitted to the Bar of the State of New Jersey and the Bar of the United States District Court, District of New Jersey, in December 1987.

In 1986, Christie married Mary Pat Foster, a fellow student at the University of Delaware. After marriage they shared a one-room apartment in Summit, New Jersey. Mary Pat Christie pursued a career in investment banking, eventually working at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. She left the firm in 2001 following the September 11th attacks, only recently returning to work part-time. They have since had four children. Christie and his family reside in Mendham Township.

Christie is of Irish and Italian descent.

Career

Lawyer

In 1987, Christie joined the law firm of Dughi, Hewit & Palatucci of Cranford, New Jersey. In 1993, he was named a partner in the firm. Christie specialized in securities law, appellate practice, election law, and government affairs. He is a member of the American Bar Association and the New Jersey State Bar Association and was a member of the Election Law Committee of the New Jersey State Bar Association.

Morris County Freeholder

Christie, at the time a resident of Mendham, was in 1994 elected as a Republican to the Morris County, New Jersey, Board of Chosen Freeholders, with Christie and a running mate having defeated incumbent freeholders in the party primary. After that election, the defeated incumbents filed defamation lawsuits against Christie based on statements made during the primary campaign. Christie had incorrectly stated that the incumbents were under investigation for violating certain local laws. The lawsuit was settled out of court.

As freeholder, Christie required the county government to obtain three quotes from all qualified firms for all contracts. He led a successful effort to bar county officials from accepting gifts from people and firms doing business with the county. He voted to raise the county's open space tax for land preservation; however, county taxes on the whole were decreased by 6.6% during his tenure. He successfully pushed for the dismissal of an architect hired to design a new jail, saying that the architect was costing taxpayers too much money. The architect then sued Christie for defamation over remarks he made about the dismissal.

In 1995, Christie announced a bid for a seat in the New Jersey General Assembly; he and attorney Rick Merkt ran as a ticket against incumbent Assemblyman Anthony Bucco and attorney Michael Patrick Carroll in the Republican primary. Bucco and Carroll, the establishment candidates, defeated the up-and-comers by a wide margin. After this loss, Christie's bid for re-nomination to the freeholder board was unlikely, as unhappy Republicans recruited John J. Murphy to run against Christie in 1997. Murphy defeated Christie in the primary. Murphy, who had falsely accused Christie of having the county pay his legal bills in the architect's lawsuit, was sued by Christie after the election. They settled out of court; nevertheless, Christie's career in Morris County politics was over by 1998.

Lobbyist

In 1998 Christie registered as a lobbyist for the firm of Dughi, Hewit & Palatucci, alongside fellow partner and later, gubernatorial campaign fundraiser Bill Palatucci. Between 1999 and 2001, Christie and Palatucci lobbied on behalf of, among others, GPU Energy for deregulation of New Jersey's electric and gas industry; the Securities Industry Association to block the inclusion of securities fraud under the state's Consumer Fraud Act; Hackensack University Medical Center for state grants, and the University of Phoenix for a New Jersey higher education license.

United States Attorney

Christie served as the chief federal law enforcement officer in New Jersey from January 17, 2002 to December 1, 2008. His office included 137 attorneys, with offices in Newark, Trenton and Camden. Christie also served as one of the 17 U.S. Attorneys on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' advisory committee.

Appointment

On December 7, 2001, Christie was nominated to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. He was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on December 20, 2001, and sworn into office on January 17, 2002.

Controversy surrounded his appointment: some members of the New Jersey Bar professed disappointment at Christie's lack of criminal law experience and his history as a top fundraiser for George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. The extent of the role played by Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, also became an issue after Christie's law partner, William Palatucci, a Republican political consultant and Bush supporter, boasted that he had selected a United States attorney by forwarding Christie's résumé to Rove.

Christie has stated that his familial connection to Tino Fiumara never came up during his Federal Bureau of Investigation background check for his position as a U.S. Attorney; he told The New York Times in 2009 that he had assumed that investigators were aware of the connection. During his tenure as U.S. Attorney, Christie recused himself from his office's investigation, indictment, and prosecution of Fiumara for aiding the flight of a fugitive.

Achievements

Christie in 2008

Despite the initial misgivings over his degree of experience, Christie proceeded to earn praise for his history of convictions for public corruption. During his tenure, Christie's office won convictions or guilty pleas from 130 public officials, both Republican and Democratic, on the state, county and local levels without losing a single case. The most notable of these convictions included those of Hudson County Executive Robert C. Janiszewski in 2002 on bribery charges, Essex County Executive James W. Treffinger in 2003 on corruption charges, former New Jersey Senate President John A. Lynch, Jr. in 2006 on charges of mail fraud and tax evasion, State Senator and former Newark mayor Sharpe James in 2008 on fraud charges, and State Senator Wayne R. Bryant in 2008 on charges of bribery, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

While United States attorney Christie also filed an amicus curiae brief in favor of an Albanian Muslim Mosque seeking to build in Wayne Township, New Jersey which had been denied a building permit multiple times and was now facing an attempt to take their land through eminent domain proceedings.

Criticism

Christie has faced some criticism for actions and decisions taken by the U.S. Attorney's Office during his tenure. Much of this criticism has centered on his office's appointments of federal monitors in deferred prosecution agreements, and on claims that Christie used the power of his office to tarnish Democrats facing election. Christie has also been criticized by the ACLU for his office's use of warrantless cellphone tracking and for what critics claim was entrapment in a high-profile terrorism case.

Claims of misuse of deferred prosecution agreements

Christie has been accused by critics of using his office's role in crafting deferred prosecution agreements to award lucrative federal monitoring positions in no-bid contracts to friends, supporters, and allies. Questions first arose after Christie awarded a multimillion dollar, no-bid contract to David Kelley, another former U.S. Attorney, who had investigated Christie's brother, Todd Christie, in a 2005 fraud case involving traders at the Wall Street firm, Spear, Leeds & Kellogg. Kelley had declined to prosecute Todd Christie, who had been ranked fourth in the investigation-initiating U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint among twenty traders who earned the largest profits for their company at the expense of their customers. The top three were indicted, as were eleven other traders.

Christie was similarly criticized for his 2007 recommendation of the appointment of The Ashcroft Group, a consulting firm owned by Christie's former superior, the former United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, as a monitor in a court settlement against Zimmer Holdings, an Indiana medical supplies company. The no-bid contract was worth between $28 million and $52 million. Christie defended the decision, saying that Ashcroft’s prominence and legal acumen made him a natural choice. Christie declined to intercede when Zimmer's company lawyers protested the Group’s plans to charge a rate of $1.5 million to $2.9 million per month for the monitoring. Shortly after the House Judiciary Committee began holding hearings on the matter, the Justice Department re-wrote the rules regarding the appointment of court monitors.

Christie also faced criticism over the terms of a $311 million fraud settlement with Bristol-Myers Squibb. Christie’s office deferred criminal prosecution of the pharmaceutical company in a deal that required it to dedicate $5 million for a business ethics chair at Seton Hall University School of Law, Christie's alma mater. The U.S. Justice Department subsequently set guidelines forbidding such requirements as components of out-of-court corporate crime settlements.

In June 2009, Christie was called before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its consideration of new regulations on deferred prosecution agreements. In his testimony, he defended his decisions to award no-bid, high-paying federal monitoring contracts to law firms that his critics say constitute a conflict of interest. Christie left the meeting after two and a half hours of questioning, against the requests of the Committee's chairman, stating that he had to attend to pressing business in New Jersey.

Claims of partisan attacks

Christie at the swearing-in ceremony of Union City, New Jersey Mayor Brian P. Stack, May 18, 2010.

Christie has been criticized by some Democrats for what they say are attempts to tarnish candidates facing election; they point, for instance, to Christie's well-publicized subpoenaing of Senator Robert Menendez during his contested 2006 campaign, just two months before the election. Christie's aides have insisted that they initiated the action in response to an article that appeared in The Record, which reported that while Mr. Menendez was a U.S. Representative he had in 1994 leased his former home to a social service agency that he had helped obtain federal financing. The non-profit group paid Menendez more than $300,000 over nine years to rent the building. Mr. Menendez claims to have cleared the arrangement with the Congressional ethics office, a step that had also been reported previously by New Jersey newspapers. According to Menendez, just prior to signing the rental lease, he cleared it by phone with a lawyer on the staff of the United States House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Following the subpoena, the lawyer, who no longer works with the Committee, came forward to say that while she doesn’t recall the conversation, it probably happened—and that if she were advising Menendez now she would tell him, as she apparently did then, that there was nothing improper about the arrangement. As of August 2009, nothing has come from the investigation.

Cell phone monitoring and alleged entrapment

In 2005, Christie prosecuted the Hemant Lakhani terrorism case, in which the defendant claimed that he had been entrapped. In that case, Christie's office relied on an informant who had been dismissed by the FBI as unreliable for fabricating claims of terrorist activity. For more than a year, the informant, working with the U.S. attorney's office, solicited Lakhani for access to arms. Lakhani was unable to obtain anything until an undercover agent contacted him and supplied him with a fake missile. In an interview with the public radio program "This American Life," Christie brushed off suggestions that Lakhani was entrapped by law enforcement. Defending the Lakhani prosecution, Christie set forth the following theory of law enforcement:

Once you find someone who is that basically amoral, then whether or not he was actually able to do it, that debate ... who cares? I mean at the end, who cares? I don't have a crystal ball. And I don't know if this had fallen apart what Hemant Lakhani would have done next. ... I'm just not willing to take that chance. ... There are good people and bad people. Bad people do bad things. Bad people have to be punished. These are simple truths. Bad people must be punished.

In April 2009, Christie came under fire from the ACLU for authorizing warrantless cellphone tracking of people in 79 instances. Christie has stressed that the practice was legal and court approved.

2009 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate

Campaign

On January 8, 2009, Christie filed papers to run for governor. In the primary on June 2, Christie won the Republican nomination with 55% of the vote, defeating conservative opponents Steve Lonegan and Rick Merkt.

On July 20, 2009, Christie announced that he had chosen Kimberly Guadagno, Monmouth County sheriff, to complete his campaign ticket as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Guadagno, who was elected sheriff in 2007, had previously served on the Monmouth Beach Board of Adjustment, and also as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

Christie faced criticism for his acceptance of $23,800 in campaign contributions (and the resulting $47,600 in public finance matching funds) from a law firm that received a federal monitor contract while Christie served as the state's U.S. Attorney. In 2006, Christie approved a deferred prosecution agreement with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey after it admitted committing Medicare fraud. He appointed Herbert Stern, a former federal judge and prosecutor, to the $500-per-hour post of federal monitor. Christie's close friend and fundraiser John Inglesino, a partner in Stern's law firm, was paid $325 per hour for his work as counsel on the monitorship. Stern's law firm, Stern and Killcullen, received reported more than $10 million in legal fees from the contract. Stern, Inglesino, a third partner, and their wives have since each made the maximum contribution of $3,400 to Christie's gubernatorial campaign.

On August 18, 2009, Christie acknowledged that he had loaned $46,000 to first assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Michele Brown two years ago, while serving as her superior as the state's U.S. attorney, and that he had failed to report either the loan or its monthly $500 interest payments on both his income tax returns and his mandatory financial disclosure report to the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission. In response to the disclosure of the financial relationship between Christie and Brown, State Senator Loretta Weinberg, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, called on Brown to recuse herself from the task of retrieving U.S. Attorney’s Office records requested by the Corzine campaign under the Freedom of Information Act. On August 25, 2009, Brown resigned from her post, stating that she does not want to be "a distraction" for the office.

On November 3, Christie defeated Corzine by a margin of 48.5% to 44.9%, with 5.8% of the vote going to independent candidate Chris Daggett.

Positions on issues

• Abortion: Christie is personally against abortion: "I am pro-life. Hearing the strong heartbeat of my unborn daughter 14 years ago at 13 weeks gestation had a profound effect on me and my beliefs." He has stated, with respect to his opposition to abortion, that he would not use the governor's office to "force that down people's throats", but does favor restrictions on abortion such as banning the procedure popularly known as partial-birth abortion, requiring parental notification, and imposing a 24-hour waiting period. Christie's lieutenant governor, Kimberly Guadagno, is, however, pro-choice.

• Drugs: Christie supports the notion of medical marijuana, but opposes New Jersey's proposed medical marijuana bill, which would allow state-registered patients suffering from certain medical ailments to grow marijuana plants for personal medicinal use or purchase the drug at a licensed center.

• Education:
  • Christie, whose own children attend Catholic parochial school, is a strong supporter of the state granting tax credits to parents who send their children to private and parochial schools.
  • He also supports the introduction of state-funded vouchers, which parents of students in failing school districts could use to pay the tuition of private schools, or of public schools in communities other than their own which agree to accept them.
  • Christie has stated that his intention to increase the number of charter schools in cities.
  • Christie supports merit pay for teachers.

• Energy and environment:
  • Christie has stated that he believes that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is too big and is "killing business" with permit delays and indiscriminate fines. He announced that, if elected, the agency would be his first target for government reduction: he would reduce its workforce and strip it of its fish and wildlife oversight.
  • Christie has stated that he intends to simultaneously spur growth in the state's manufacturing sector and increase New Jersey's capability to produce alternative energy. He has proposed a list of policy measures to achieve this, including giving tax credits to businesses that build new wind energy and manufacturing facilities, changing land use rules to allow solar energy on permanently preserved farmland, installing solar farms on closed landfills, setting up a consolidated energy promotion program, and following a five-to-one production to non-production job ratio in the creation of new energy jobs.

• Guns: Christie has said that he supports strict and aggressive enforcement of the state's current gun laws. He however supports the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.

• Illegal immigration:
  • While serving as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Christie stressed that simply "[b]eing in this country without proper documentation is not a crime," but rather a civil wrong; and that undocumented people are not criminals unless they have re-entered the country after being deported. As such, Christie stated, responsibility for dealing with improperly-documented foreign nationals lies with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the U.S. Attorney's Office.
  • Christie has been critical about section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, enacted in 1996, which can be used to grant local law enforcement officers power to perform immigration law enforcement functions. Christie's running mate, Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno, on the other hand, applied for and was granted approval under 287(g) to have officers at the county jail deputized as immigration agents.

• Organized crime:
  • Christie says that as United States attorney he was always tough on organized crime, though it did not rank as high among his priorities as public corruption, terrorism, violent street gangs or human trafficking did. He added that he stands by a 2007 comment he made that "the Mafia is much more prominent on HBO than in New Jersey."
• Same-sex marriage: Christie has said that he favors New Jersey's current law allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions but would veto any bill legalizing same-sex marriage, saying, "I also believe marriage should be exclusively between one man and one woman.... If a bill legalizing same sex marriage came to my desk as Governor, I would veto it."
• Taxes: Christie has promised not to raise taxes. He has also vowed to lower the state income, property, and business taxes, with the qualification that this might not occur immediately: "I'm not saying I'm cutting taxes in the first year. The first thing we have to do is get our fiscal house in order, and that's going to be tough." He has not yet taken a position on the state's property tax rebate program.

Governor

Christie took office as Governor of New Jersey on January 19, 2010. On February 9, 2010, he signed Executive Order No. 12, which placed a 90-day freeze on the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) and established the Housing Opportunity Task Force to examine the State's affordable housing laws, constitutional obligations, and the effectiveness of the current framework. The Task Force will issue a report within 90 days that makes recommendations to the Governor on reforming the State's affordable housing policies.

On February 11, 2010, Christie signed Executive Order No. 14, which declared a "state of fiscal emergency exists in the State of New Jersey" due to the projected $2.2 billion budget deficit for the current fiscal year (FY 2010). In a speech before a special joint session of the New Jersey Legislature on the same day, Christie addressed the budget deficit and revealed a list of fiscal solutions to close the gap. The cuts included withholding $475 million in State aid to more than 500 school districts, forcing them to spend their surpluses instead. State subsidies to NJ Transit, higher education, and hospitals were also cut. Christie also suspended funding for the Department of the Public Advocate and called for its elimination. Some Democrats criticized Christie for not first consulting them on his budget cuts and for circumventing the Legislature's role in the budget process.

He is strongly advocating a 2.5% cap on property taxes.

Electoral history

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Chris Christie

• Office of the Governor
• Chris Christie on the Internet Movie Database

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v • d • e Current elected statewide political officials of New Jersey U.S. Senators Frank Lautenberg (D) · Robert Menendez (D) State government Chris Christie (R), Governor · Kim Guadagno (R), Lieutenant Governor Senate Stephen M. Sweeney (D), President · Nia Gill (D), President pro tempore · Barbara Buono (D), Majority Leader · Thomas Kean, Jr. (R), Minority Leader General Assembly Sheila Y. Oliver (D), Speaker · Jerry Green (D), Speaker pro tempore · Joseph Cryan (D), Majority Leader · Alex DeCroce (R), Minority Leader Supreme Court (appointed) Stuart Rabner, Chief Justice · Virginia Long · Jaynee LaVecchia · Barry T. Albin · Roberto A. Rivera-Soto · Helen E. Hoens · (vacancy)