The StoneZONE with Roger Stone - Roger Stone on Chris Christie

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00:01:00.000 The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative.

00:01:03.540 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.

00:01:06.880 Speaking, though, of being overestimated, this is almost too good to be true.

00:01:12.800 Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, says he is pondering a third presidential bid in 2028.

00:01:21.440 I said, well, Chris Christie needs to run, not for president.

00:01:25.480 He just needs to run.

00:01:26.820 he posted a piece online

00:01:29.860 that says he was going to save

00:01:31.160 the Republican Party

00:01:33.380 I said the only thing he's going to save is

00:01:35.200 room for that third dessert

00:01:37.440 I mean

00:01:38.940 these politicians never know when their time has

00:01:41.220 come and gone but

00:01:42.940 the study of Chris Christie's rise

00:01:45.300 in New Jersey

00:01:46.900 and his relationship with his brother

00:01:48.840 presents a fascinating case study

00:01:51.080 New Jersey politics

00:01:52.700 has long resembled a carnival

00:01:55.040 midway, where the games appear simple, the prizes glitter enticingly, and the operators insist

00:02:01.500 everything is perfectly legitimate. Yet the more closely one examines the mechanics of the

00:02:06.160 enterprise, the more one begins to suspect that the odds have been arranged rather carefully.

00:02:12.460 A few stories illustrate this curious arithmetic of power better than the saga of

00:02:16.660 Chris Christie and his younger brother, Todd Christie. They both attended the University

00:02:22.820 of Delaware, Chris Christie built the resume of a future politician

00:02:27.080 becoming U.S. attorney while his brother Todd gravitated

00:02:31.120 to Wall Street and made a fortune there.

00:02:35.520 And in 2005, the Securities and Exchange Commission

00:02:40.740 charged 20 specialist traders connected to Todd Christie's firm,

00:02:46.240 Spear, Leeds, and Kellogg with civil fraud for engaging

00:02:50.400 in trading practices that enriched their firms

00:02:52.920 while disadvantaging their customers.

00:02:55.940 Todd Christie was among those charged.

00:02:58.780 Regulators alleged that between 1999 and 2003,

00:03:03.460 that Todd Christie participated in more than 1,600 improper trades

00:03:07.620 involving major corporations, including IBM, AOL, Time Warner, AIG, and so on.

00:03:16.180 according to the SEC, these maneuvers produced nearly $1.59 million in profit for the firm,

00:03:23.320 while investors absorbed about $1.5 million in additional costs or losses. Now, one might

00:03:29.300 reasonably assume that these allegations would attract the attention of criminal prosecutors.

00:03:34.960 Indeed, 15 of the 20 traitors in the firm were indicted on criminal fraud charges by the U.S.

00:03:41.100 Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York. Those charges carried potential prison

00:03:46.820 sentences of up to 10 years. But strangely, Todd Christie was not among those charged. Instead,

00:03:54.380 Todd Christie faced only civil enforcement. In 2008, he settled the SEC case without admitting

00:04:01.980 wrongdoing, agreeing to disgorge the profits and pay penalties while acknowledging hundreds of

00:04:07.420 improper trades. In other words, criminal charges were never materialized in his case.

00:04:12.740 Now, the official explanation offered by prosecutors was simple. The evidence, they said,

00:04:17.920 supported civil enforcement but not criminal prosecution. That decision was made by the

00:04:23.200 office of the U.S. Attorney, David Kelly, in the Southern District of New York. Chris Christie was

00:04:29.020 serving at that time as the U.S. Attorney for the neighboring district of New Jersey, and of course

00:04:35.480 had no formal jurisdiction himself over the case.

00:04:38.640 At least that's the official explanation.

00:04:41.380 Yet politics, like comedy, depends heavily on timing.

00:04:45.880 Two years later, Todd Christie escaped criminal prosecution.

00:04:50.560 Chris Christie's office then awarded David Kelly,

00:04:54.640 leaving the government service for private practice,

00:04:57.600 a lucrative corporate monitorship

00:05:00.240 connected to a deferred prosecution agreement

00:05:03.060 involving a company called Biomet Orthopedics.

00:05:07.220 The assignment required Kelly to oversee corporate compliance reforms

00:05:10.860 following allegations that the company had paid kickbacks to doctors

00:05:14.600 for using its hip and knee implants.

00:05:17.960 Now, monitorships of this sort are not like modest consulting gigs.

00:05:23.440 They actually generate millions of dollars in legal fees.

00:05:27.700 The exact value of Kelly's appointment by Chris Christie

00:05:30.740 was never publicly disclosed, but such arrangements frequently produce enormous revenue streams

00:05:36.320 for the law firms involved. Chris Christie's defenders insist, of course, that his selection

00:05:42.180 of Kelly was based solely on merit. They noted that monitors were paid by the companies involved

00:05:47.840 rather than the taxpayers. They also observed that the practice of appointing outside monitors was

00:05:52.700 common in federal prosecution agreements during that period. Well, perhaps so. Yet the optics

00:06:00.640 would cause even the most charitable observer to pause for a moment. A politically connected

00:06:05.680 Wall Street executive avoids criminal prosecution. The prosecutor who made the decision later receives

00:06:11.480 a lucrative assignment from the executive's brother, who happens to be a powerful U.S.

00:06:16.360 attorney. Are we truly expected to believe that no curious citizen might raise an eyebrow at this

00:06:22.340 sequence of events, yet no reporter would write this story the way I've just laid it out for you.

00:06:32.020 Chris Christie has always portrayed himself as a crusading corruption fighter. During his tenure

00:06:37.760 as U.S. attorney, he prosecuted more than 100 public officials, both Republicans and Democrats.

00:06:43.180 That reputation served him well politically, helping propel him to the governor's office in

00:06:47.980 2009. Yet the pattern of lucrative monitorships under Chris Christie did not end with this case

00:06:56.040 of David Kelly. Another prominent case, he appointed former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft

00:07:01.420 as a corporate monitor in a settlement involving another medical device manufacturing company

00:07:06.500 called Zimmer Holdings. Ashcroft's firm reportedly earned up to $52 million. Also appointed David

00:07:14.300 Samson, a close political ally to another

00:07:16.720 monitorship role, one might ask whether

00:07:18.620 New Jersey's celebrated corruption

00:07:20.540 fighter had inadvertently created

00:07:22.500 a rather comfortable patronage system for

00:07:24.480 well-connected heavyweights.

00:07:27.300 Yet the Chris Christie story

00:07:28.500 does not end there.

00:07:30.800 Chris Christie's tenure as governor

00:07:32.280 eventually became a vote shattered by the

00:07:34.420 infamous Bridgegate scandal.

00:07:36.660 You remember that, in which traffic

00:07:38.500 lanes on the George Washington Bridge were

00:07:40.400 closed in apparent retaliation

00:07:42.080 against a mayor who declined to endorse Christie's re-election campaign.

00:07:47.140 So although the Supreme Court later overturned the criminal convictions

00:07:50.720 of two Christie associates involved in that scheme,

00:07:54.080 the episode left behind a lingering question about the culture

00:07:57.720 that had developed in the New Jersey governor's office.

00:08:01.340 When the political staff believes it's acceptable to weaponize

00:08:04.240 the busiest bridge in America as a tool of petty political vengeance,

00:08:08.840 What does that say about the broader environment in which such a decision is made?

00:08:14.420 The Christie brothers represent a fascinating case study in modern political power.

00:08:19.100 One brother accumulates $60 million in a Wall Street windfall,

00:08:24.060 becomes entangled in a trading scandal,

00:08:25.940 and somehow avoids critical criminal prosecution.

00:08:29.440 The other brother ascends through the federal prosecutor system,

00:08:32.500 appoints lucrative monitorships to well-connected allies,

00:08:35.640 ultimately is elected governor.

00:08:37.880 And then, of course, Chris Christie turned with a vengeance against Donald Trump,

00:08:42.340 fired as the first head of the presidential transition in Donald Trump's first term.

00:08:48.140 He's now pitched his tent as a critic of Donald Trump.

00:08:53.520 He has zero chance of being nominated in the Trump-dominated Republican Party of Donald Trump.

00:09:00.660 First of all, I'm not sure where he would raise the money.

00:09:03.300 You see, when you're the governor of a state, you have enormous leverage

00:09:06.760 for fundraising. You essentially extort money from those who do business with the state, but

00:09:11.460 he's long since left the governorship, and he is right now in the polls rated as one of the most

00:09:18.280 unpopular former governors of New Jersey, and that includes a list of several governors who

00:09:24.340 have either been disgraced or gone to prison. So it is interesting to watch this kind of

00:09:32.500 self-adulation, but Chris Christie is not a viable candidate for president. Again, as I said

00:09:40.640 earlier, Republicans would be wise to focus on 2026 before they worry about 2028, but we have

00:09:50.240 not one, we have two frontrunners, J.D. Vance, who leads in most of the public preference polls.

00:09:57.100 I'm a Republican, to be honest with you. Republicans, we don't dump sitting vice

00:10:01.840 presidents. After four years, over two terms, eight years as vice president, Richard Nixon

00:10:09.180 followed Dwight Eisenhower. After four years under Ronald Reagan, George Bush followed the

00:10:15.420 great Ronald Reagan. The chances are overwhelming that J.D. Vance, who I noticed yesterday was being

00:10:21.600 attacked by Steve Bannon, another good sign for J.D., is very likely to be the Republican nominee.

The StoneZONE with Roger Stone - September 25, 2026

Roger Stone on Chris Christie

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