Chris Christie has been attending Republican events suddenly, and some are speculating that he may be thinking of running for office again. But is he thinking about running for President? And if so, who would be the most powerful man in New Jersey?
00:00:52.640Christie then endorsed Trump, briefly serving as the head of his transition team, but now claims that Jared Kushner fired him from that job, claiming that the dispute between the two brothers should have been handled by the rabbis in rabbinical court.
00:01:12.300Charles Kushner was ultimately charged and convicted with essentially blackmailing his brother and was pardoned on the same day that President Donald Trump pardoned me.
00:01:24.440But the idea of Chris Christie as some kind of Mr. Clean is pretty laughable.
00:01:31.700New Jersey politics has long resembled Carnival Midway, where the games appear simple, the prizes glitter enticingly, and the operators insist everything is perfectly legitimate.
00:01:44.180But the more closely one looks at the mechanics of the politics in the Garden State, the more one will begin to suspect the odds have been arranged very carefully.
00:01:55.200Few stories, in my opinion, illustrate this curious arithmetic of power better than the story of Chris Christie and his younger brother, Todd.
00:02:05.360Christie brothers were raised in Newark, later Livingston, New Jersey, in a middle class household.
00:02:10.840Their father, Bill Christie, worked as a Wall Street accountant, while their mother, Sandra, served as a receptionist.
00:02:18.300Like most ambitious families in New Jersey's upward mobile suburbs, the Christie's encouraged achievement and advancement.
00:02:26.060Chris Christie chose the path of law and politics, while his brother, Todd, gravitated towards the high-velocity universe of Wall Street.
00:02:35.360Both brothers attended the University of Delaware.
00:02:38.400Chris built a resume for a future political combatant, in fact, made an earlier race for the Morris County Board of Freeholders.
00:02:47.980They call them commissioners today, a race that he lost while Todd entered the trading pits where fortunes are made and lost at a speed that would make a casino blackjack dealer dizzy.
00:03:01.220Todd Christie eventually rose through the ranks of Spear, Leeds and Kellogg's specialists, became its chief executive.
00:03:08.400When Goldman Sachs purchased the firm in 2000 for more than six billion dollars, Todd Christie reportedly walked away with approximately 60 million dollars.
00:03:19.980Now, 60 million dollars is an enormous amount of money.
00:03:24.300In 2005, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged 20 specialist traders connected to the Todd Christie's company, Spear, Leeds, and Kellogg with civil fraud for engaging in trading practices that enriched their firms while disadvantaging the customers.
00:03:45.720Todd Christie was among those initially charged.
00:03:48.620Regulators alleged that between 1999 and 2003 that Todd Christie participated in more than 1,600 improper trades involving major corporations including IBM, AOL, Time Warner, AIG, and others.
00:04:06.120According to the SEC, these maneuvers produced approximately $1.59 million in profit for the firm, while investors absorbed about $1.4 million in additional costs.
00:04:21.180Well, one might expect that this would come to the attention of criminal prosecutors.
00:04:26.460Indeed, 15 of the 20 traders were indicted on criminal fraud charges by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
00:04:34.540Those charges carried potential prison sentences up to 10 years.
00:04:40.660Todd Christie, however, was not among those charged.
00:04:44.360In fact, Todd Christie faced only civil enforcement in 2008.
00:04:49.000He settled the SEC case without admitting wrongdoing, agreeing to disgorge profits and pay penalties while acknowledging hundreds of improper trades.
00:04:59.460Criminal charges against Todd Christie never materialized.
00:05:03.760The official explanation offered by prosecutors was simple.
00:05:07.300The evidence, they said, supported civil enforcement but not criminal prosecution.
00:05:12.560That decision was made by the office of U.S. Attorney David Kelly in the Southern District of New York.
00:05:19.440Chris Christie was serving at that time as the U.S. attorney for the adjoining district in New Jersey
00:05:25.380and therefore had no formal jurisdiction over his brother's case.
00:05:30.160Yet politics like comedy depends heavily on timing.
00:05:34.800Two years after Todd Christie escaped criminal prosecution, Chris Christie's U.S. attorney office awarded David Kelly's a lucrative corporate monitorship connected to deferred prosecution agreements involving biomet orthopedics.
00:05:51.400The assignment required Kelly to oversee corporate compliance reforms following allegations that the company had paid kickbacks to doctors for using its hip and knee implants.
00:06:03.380Now, these monitorships are the sort of thing that make men wealthy.
00:06:08.340These are not some modest consulting gigs.
00:06:12.560They generate millions of dollars for legal fees.
00:06:15.960the exact value of Kelly's appointment has never publicly been disclosed, but such arrangements
00:06:22.200frequently produce enormous revenue streams for the firms and the lawyers involved.
00:06:29.780Christie's defenders insist the selection of Kelly was based solely on merit. They noted that
00:06:36.480monitors paid by the companies involved rather than taxpayers. They also observed that the
00:06:41.700practice of appointing outside monitors was common, but no one argues with that. Why, however,
00:06:47.280this particular lawyer? This is not the first time this has happened with Chris Christie,
00:06:52.900as the optics would cause even the most charitable observer to poise and say,
00:06:57.780hmm, isn't this strange? A politically connected Wall Street executive voids criminal prosecution.
00:07:03.420The prosecutor who made that decision later receives a lucrative assignment from the
00:07:07.660executive's brother, who happens to be a powerful U.S. attorney. And we're truly expected to believe
00:07:12.620that there's no curious eyebrow that should be raised about this strange sequence of events.
00:07:19.000Chris Christie, who has always portrayed himself as a crusading corruption fighter during his term
00:07:24.900as U.S. attorney, prosecuted more than 100 public officials in New Jersey, had a reputation that
00:07:30.660served him well, helped propel him to the governor's office in 2009. Yet this strange
00:07:36.660pattern of monitorships under Christie's watch did not end with the very suspicious one by David
00:07:44.120Kelly. In another prominent case, he appointed former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft as a
00:07:52.420corporate monitor in a settlement involving medical device manufacturer Zimmer Holdings.
00:07:58.560Ashcroft's firm reportedly ended up with $52 million from that assignment. Christie also
00:08:05.740appointed David Sampson, a close political ally, to another monitorship role. Sampson would later
00:08:12.700be forced to resign from the New York, New Jersey Commission over financial improprieties.
00:08:23.300One might ask whether New Jersey's celebrated corruption insider had inadvertently created a
00:08:28.020comfortable patron system for well-connected legal heavyweights, particularly those who might have
00:08:33.200presidential ambitions. Meanwhile, Todd Christie continued to prosper. His Wall Street fortunes
00:08:39.320migrated into real estate investments and private financial ventures. He founded Big Blue Trading,
00:08:45.440remained active in business development and advisory roles. His wealth spread across
00:08:49.900properties in Harrison, Mendham Township, and Point Pleasant Beach. Political contributions
00:08:55.400followed as well, with hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing from Republican causes and
00:08:59.820campaigns to the home in the campaigns of Chris Christie. Yet the Chris Christie story still does
00:09:06.440not end there. Chris Christie's tenure as governor eventually became overshadowed by the most
00:09:11.260infamous political scandal in the state's history, Bridgegate. The Bridgegate scandal in which
00:09:17.580traffic lanes on George Washington Bridge were closed in apparent retaliation against a Democrat
00:09:24.480mayor who had refused to endorse Chris Christie's re-election. Although the Supreme Court later
00:09:30.540overturned the criminal conviction of two of Christie's aides who were allegedly involved
00:09:36.060in the scheme, the episode left a lingering question about the culture that had developed
00:09:41.740within the governor's office. Having known every one of those people who were convicted in this
00:09:47.220crime or known others who did, and knowing Chris Christie's zeal as a political control freak
00:09:53.940and one with a mean spirit, I have little doubt that Chris Christie did know about the George
00:10:01.760Washington Bridge closing as an act of political revenge. I have long believed that had we taken
00:10:11.600him for vice president, people forget this, but after Trump was nominated, he was facing a choice
00:11:16.220Chris Christie's continuing pot shots at Donald Trump are fun because he always holds himself out kind of as Mr. Clean, Mr. Integrity.
00:11:30.880And as I've told you, basically, he gave a multimillion dollar conservatorship to a prosecutor to give his brother a pass on insider trading in a case in which everyone else went to jail.
00:11:43.540The Republican Party has a bench for 2028. That's for sure. J.D. Vance would certainly still have to be considered the favorite. Republican Party nominates sitting vice presidents and Vance does a very effective behind the scenes job. The job does not lend itself to being out front.
00:12:01.920There is, of course, Secretary Marco Rubio, whose popularity grows as he takes a hard line against narco Marxist drug trafficking in this hemisphere.0.95
00:12:15.040And as he and Donald Trump seem to be closing in on the prize of a free Cuba with news today that the Cuban agreement, Cuban government has agreed to open negotiations with the United States.
00:12:28.580This is a historic act. This is a country on whom we have an economic embargo.
00:12:37.640I've long said Tulsi Gabbard has impressed me with the courage to declassify all the documents pertaining to the Russian collusion hoax.
00:12:47.160And now she has uncovered even more internal government plots, unconstitutional plots against the Trump administration.
00:12:55.540But more importantly, she's now studying the issue of election integrity, the integrity of mail-in ballots, the manipulability and the integrity and security of electronic voting machines.
00:13:09.960And she will report to the president on that.
00:13:16.540Governor Chris Christie is not in that circle.
00:13:19.540But then again, Chris Christie could probably not fit in the circle.
00:13:23.600I'm Roger Stone, you're listening to Stone Zone, and we'll be right back.
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00:14:29.760Your full Great Outdoors Comedy Festival lineup is here on September 11th through 13th at Arendelle Park.
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00:15:14.980the stone zone entertaining and informative on the red apple podcast network and we're back
00:15:25.160in the stone zone with the president's uh lightning like attacks on iran comes my
00:15:31.680concern about the many terrorist sleeper cells that may very well be in the united states after
00:15:38.760Overall, I think Joe Biden's open borders policy let as many as, I don't know, 36 million into the country.
00:15:50.300We know that at least 312 of them matched some terrorist database, but we have no idea how many other terrorists have entered the country.
00:16:00.260We've already had multiple attacks. The Austin bar shooting on March 1st in Austin, a immigrant from Senegal opened fire near a crowded bar using a firearm, wore clothing with religious messaging and imagery connected to Iran.
00:16:18.780Sadly, the police shot and killed him during the incident.
00:16:21.140Then there was the attempted bomb attack in Manhattan.
00:16:26.060Both of the suspects from Bucks Council, Pennsylvania, as I think most New Yorkers have now heard, they threw improvised explosive devices near the mayor's residence during a protest.
00:16:37.440Police say the suspects were inspired by ISIS ideology.
00:16:43.380The bombs failed, thank God, to explode.
00:16:45.740Now a shooting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Mohammed Baylor Jallal, a U.S. resident originally connected to Sierra Leone background, entered an ROTC classroom and opened fire, shouting Ali Akbar during the attack.
00:17:08.660previously convicted in 2016 in another action of supporting ISIS,
00:17:14.340was ultimately killed by students who subdued him.
00:17:16.920And now the attack at the Temple Israel Synagogue,
00:17:22.000which is in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
00:17:28.100A man named Ayman Mohad Ghazali, born in Lebanon,
00:17:33.980later, however, a U.S. citizen living in Michigan,
00:17:36.280and rammed a truck into a synagogue and opened fire.
00:17:39.760This is very clearly yet another hate crime.
00:17:44.620And then, of course, the Chabad headquarters vehicle attack in Brooklyn, New York.
00:17:50.020The attacker not yet under-identified the event.
00:17:53.480We have very little information still under investigation, possibly an anti-Semitic hate crime.
00:18:00.380If American politics were not this dangerous, it would be funny,
00:18:03.780but only in the surreal circus of contemporary New York City could an ISIS-inspired bombing attempt be blamed on white supremacists,
00:18:12.880which is essentially what Mayor Ayatollah Zoran Mamdami did when he learned the news about the attack on the taxpayer-funded mission on the East River.
00:18:26.820It really is the circus of the absurd.
00:18:31.780Mayor Mamdami wants to talk about how evil the landlords are,
00:18:36.940but he certainly doesn't want to talk about the dangers of radical Islam,
00:19:41.080The SAVE Act just very simply requires that one be a U.S. citizen
00:19:45.760in order to vote in our federal elections
00:19:47.920and that one have a picture ID, a reasonable form of identification that proves their citizenship.
00:19:55.880To say that that is somehow racist is to say that black people or other minorities are too stupid
00:20:03.500or incapable of getting an ID when everybody I know that's black and I have black friends,
00:20:09.260they all have IDs. So this is really the answer.
00:20:13.560The problem is that the hidebound rules of the U.S. Senate don't seem to be letting a bill that has 50 committed votes move to the floor.
00:20:25.620Now, normally, when there is a tie vote in the Senate, let's assume every Democrat votes against it and a few Republicans vote against it, has at least 50 votes.
00:20:39.160If it were a tie vote, that tie vote would be broken by the presiding officer.
00:20:45.340In this case, that is Vice President J.D. Vance.
00:20:50.220But because of the rules of cloture, an antiquated rule, a custom of the Senate,
00:20:57.980the current Senate Majority Leader, John Thune of Nebraska,
00:21:02.240who's kind of a Karl Rove puppet, says that he's playing to lose, essentially.
00:21:10.420He keeps insisting that he will bring it to a vote,
00:21:13.020but he knows the Republicans lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
00:21:18.960He is apparently unwilling to force the so-called talking filibuster.
00:21:22.880This is a procedural battle that keeps senators on the floor0.71
00:21:26.640but allows them to circumvent the Democrats' filibuster.
00:21:30.520Thune and the Senate Rhinos would rather be getting courted by lobbyists, taking in special interest money at elite fundraisers, perhaps even enjoying a pizza party or two on the Hill rather than stand and fight for the American people.
00:21:45.720So they give you rhetoric. Oh, Thune says, I'll bring it up for a vote. But he knows that it requires not 51 votes, but 60 votes to proceed to a vote. So it's a trick comment.
00:21:59.420Right about now, I suspect that President Donald Trump is probably sorry that he agreed to Thune being the Senate Majority Leader instead of Florida Senator Rick Scott, who very bravely vied for that position.
00:22:15.700Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, have lined up in opposition to the bill, claiming, of course, that it would restrict voting rights and that it would suppress the vote.
00:22:25.420Look, we get the joke here. This is a red herring. Nobody actually believes. The legislation simply ensures that only American citizens can vote. So why do Democrats have a problem with that? Well, because I think we know, given this giant influx into America of lower socioeconomic illegals, they hope to wave a wand at some point and give them all citizenship, therefore give them all the vote.0.90
00:22:55.420The sad question is how many of them who are illegal are already voting in our elections.
00:23:01.880One can register to vote in Florida by going to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
00:23:07.220You're not asked for proof of citizenship.
00:23:09.680You're not asked for your birth certificate.
00:23:11.500You're not asked for anything other than your name and your address.
00:23:16.340So we already have illegals voting in our elections.0.71
00:23:20.220There are other Republicans now looking at alternative ways to pass the SAVE Act, which by the way Trump calls the Save America Act. I think he's right about that. I've written and talked about this quite a bit, including attaching voter integrity provisions to a budget reconciliation bill, which could allow passage with a simple majority.
00:23:44.240so if the save act does not pass now there are still some alternatives but whether the republicans
00:23:53.260in the u.s senate have the belly for such a fight really remains to be seen so i have said for some
00:24:00.420time donald trump's problem is and the country's problem are not the leftist marxist progressive
00:24:06.720Democrats, at least you know where they're coming from.0.91
00:24:11.580Better a snake in the grass than an asp in the bosom, as the Bible says.
00:24:18.340But our problem are the feckless, gutless, weak-kneed, lily-livered, white wine-swilling,
00:24:28.740uh brie cheese eating a country club belonging establishment republicans in both the house and
00:24:38.280the senate who have no belly for a fight they don't want to look into the corruption of vice0.95
00:24:44.880president and then president joe biden it certainly looks to me like the house oversight committee
00:24:49.500uncovered multi-million dollar payments to biden's son his brother other biden family members as well
00:24:56.980as the money trail in which that money went to Joe Biden. But no talk about prosecuting him and
00:25:04.180no referral to the Justice Department for prosecution. They've been excellent at trying
00:25:09.160to get at the bottom line of the Russian collusion hoax. And this week was kind of a treat because
00:25:15.580Bill and Hillary Clinton, two of the greatest liars in American history, were both under oath.
00:25:22.740You can always tell when Bill or Hillary Clinton is lying, you know how? Their lips are moving.
00:25:28.900Hillary Clinton famously told us that it just no longer mattered why the men died in Benghazi.
00:25:35.460She kept insisting that the attack on our facility in Benghazi, Iraq, in which three American diplomats lost their lives in the most horrific way.
00:25:45.740against gang violence was caused by a video that was offensive to Islam
00:25:54.740that had somehow gotten released in a country where very few people are on the Internet,
00:26:01.000when in fact it was a planned, deliberate military precision attack on our facility.
00:26:09.780And then she lied about whether there were any classified documents among the 33,000 documents that for some reason she had illegally on a home computer server, a server that she ordered be destroyed with both hammers and beach blitz, beach blitz, bit bleach, pardon me.0.82
00:26:32.820If you have any doubt about her desire to bury evidence of the crime, she has insisted that she has few ties to Jeffrey Epstein, failing to mention that Jeffrey Epstein provided all of the seed capital for the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.
00:26:53.560Hillary also says that she's only Ghislaine Maxwell, essentially pimps Epstein's pimp, casually failing to mention that the Clinton Foundation funded millions of dollars to a nonprofit called the Tara Marr Foundation founded by Jeffrey Epstein, but run by Maxwell.
00:27:15.380This was essentially they had a program for young women, interns for this environmental program.
00:27:22.200It essentially was a grooming pool paid for by the Clintons.
00:27:27.020I always believed, and this is the theme of my 2015 book, The Clintons War on Women, that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton had a marriage of convenience.
00:27:39.160I've never criticized him for those consensual affairs.
00:27:43.200They are they are not as serious as his serial record of sexually assaulting women.
00:27:50.540Juanita Broderick, Kathy Willie, Paula Jones.
00:27:55.580I've detailed the 38 women who have come forward and accused a bill of sexual assault.
00:28:01.740I'm not speaking of Jennifer Flowers, the former nightclub singer that had a long term affair with him, or even Monica Lewinsky, who he appears to have taken advantage of.
00:28:11.320At least those were consensual events.
00:28:17.240Also detailed in my book, but also in Yahoo.com's reporting, Bill Clinton, as in the case of Juanita Broderick, had this horrific tactic of biting through the upper lip of the woman he was assaulting on the theory that a woman who's trying to stop blood from gushing from her upper lips is less able to cover her genitals when she's being attacked.
00:28:41.320Bill had the termidity as he left the hotel room to say to Juanita Broderick, I'd put some ice on that, as you, which kind of tells you the callousness of Bill Clinton.
00:28:53.680But it was Hillary who hired the nasty detectives and the heavy-handed lawyers who threatened all of these women into silence.1.00
00:29:05.580Bill's claim that he was never on Epstein's island
00:30:20.140He also, I believe, sold our military secrets, including missile targeting technology, to the communist Chinese.0.75
00:30:29.960If he were going to be impeached, that is what he should have been impeached for, not his distasteful dalliance with Ms. Lewinsky and his curious use of the cigar.
00:30:44.420I mean, Hillary Clinton is at the vortex of the Russian collusion hoax.
00:30:49.240This is the greatest single dirty trick in American politics.
00:30:53.800The documents that are that were declassified by Tulsi Gabbard proved that Hillary Clinton proved the entire operation.
00:31:01.580In fact, in the meeting in which it was agreed to, it was referred to as the Clinton plan to to blame Donald Trump with non-existent Russian influence on his behalf as an excuse as to why he won the election, but more precisely to undermine his abilities as president.
00:31:20.700And it is an ongoing conspiracy that takes you through the 2016 campaign immediately afterwards, utilizing both the phony Steele dossier and the false claim that the Democrats had targeted the Democrat National Committee in an online hack, stealing documents.
00:31:43.600No evidence of that either. But it continues through two completely fraudulent impeachments.
00:31:50.360The second one, the so-called Ukrainian impeachment, both an offensive and defensive move by the Democrats who know that Joe Biden is the one who pressured the Ukrainians, said he would withhold a billion dollars if they didn't fire the prosecutor who was investigating his son, Hunter Biden, in Burisma.
00:32:10.840It continues through the 2020 election, which now I'm happy to see Tulsi Gabbard is digging deeply in because I never believed Joe Biden got 81 million votes.
00:32:22.220And as a rule, ran 20 percent better than Bill Clinton in the African-American community.
00:32:29.780I'm glad to see that that is going to be investigated.
00:32:33.480It doesn't matter how good our economy gets. It doesn't matter how quickly the president can bring this war against Iran to an end. It doesn't matter how many peace deals he's made. It doesn't matter how low the cost of groceries drop, the price of food drops, the availability and affordability of housing drops.
00:32:56.380None of that will matter unless we have free, fair, honest elections.
00:33:06.100I really think it is time to bust the filibuster.
00:33:09.620John Thune needs to be a man, say goodbye to these rules, because the instant Republicans
00:33:14.660lose control of the Senate, the Democrats will do away with the filibuster rule, and
00:33:19.420they will jam through all kinds of crazy left-wing appointments and legislation.
00:33:25.140I'm Roger Stone. You're listening to Stone Zone.
00:33:28.160It's been a heck of a week. We'll be right back with more.
00:33:34.140The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:33:41.320As I think most people know, my wife, Anidia Batran de Espinosa Stone, is a proud Cuban-American.0.87
00:33:49.920And her story is a horrific one at the hands of the regime.
00:33:54.560Her father, Joaquin, was a lieutenant colonel in the Cuban Army, was the military attaché at the U.S. consulate for Cuba when Batista fell.
00:34:05.500He was ordered to return to Havana for briefings, but on the night that he was to return, he was tipped off by a friendly CIA man that he should not return to his native Cuba, where he was on a list of people to be liquidated.
00:34:20.100He stayed in the United States, of course, fired from his job now that the government was run by Fidel Castro, El Jefe.0.94
00:34:28.880He worked as a fuller brush man, a house painter, a printer, and he struggled to learn English and to live a subsistence because of the horrific results of communism.
00:37:12.020Is it too much to ask for that this could be solved peacefully
00:37:16.680and that we could take the kind of control in Cuba that we have.
00:37:21.880This is one of the most brutal regimes in history.
00:37:25.960Don't get the idea that this is some benign democratic society.
00:37:31.280These people are kept in line through the brutal tactics of the police state.
00:37:36.240The chief state, as they lost control in Iraq, as they were beginning to lose control in Venezuela,
00:37:43.360they're beginning to lose control even in Cuba.
00:37:45.880And that despite the Cuban government's ability to have a monopoly on all information for the last 40 years, because everything that's wrong in Cuba, if there's not enough food and not enough gasoline, not enough new tires, not enough of anything.
00:38:02.380Well, that's all because of the Yankees.
00:38:05.340That's all because of the United States.
00:38:07.680I say Cuba Libre and salute to President Donald Trump and to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for taking a hard line on narco-Marxism in our hemisphere.0.98