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State taxpayers paid for Mr. Christie, his wife and two aides to travel to the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans, as New Jersey prepared to host the 2014 game. Airfare for four passengers came to $8,146; Mr. Christie’s hotel for three nights cost $3,371.
He has fought to shield the cost of his travel. The Super Bowl expenses were revealed only after a judge’s order in a lawsuit brought by The Record, a newspaper in northern New Jersey. In response to other lawsuits and public records requests, the governor’s office has argued that he is not subject to disclosure laws regarding travel, or that it does not have the records. …NYT
The Times delves into the matter of Governor Christie and money… other people’s money. Christie is the latest if not the last of the big spenders. The details are all there in the Times report: private jets, lavish hotel stays, daddies like King Abdullah and Sheldon Adelson picking up the tabs. The report is strewn with dinner tabs in the thousands, flirts with celebrities, and “business trips” with the whole family, friends, aides paid for by one or another ally with an economic interest that depended on Christie’s magic touch as governor and prospective president.
This rule-breaking goes back a pretty long way in Christie’s career and reveals a governor for whom belt-tightening appears not to be an option — aided and abetted by selective insouciance on the part of the Justice Department.
As United States attorney for New Jersey, Mr. Christie developed a reputation for flouting the rules on travel. A Justice Department report after he left office found that he was the prosecutor who most often exceeded the charges allowed for hotel stays in different cities, without properly searching for a cheaper alternative, or justifying any exemption from the rules. He stayed at a Four Seasons in Washington and a new boutique hotel in Boston, for example, at more than double the cost allowed for those cities.
The report concerned hotel stays, but Mr. Christie’s preference for car services over taxis earned a footnote: He paid $236 to travel four miles from the airport in Boston, and $562 for a round-trip between Central London and Heathrow. Mr. Christie, who by then was governor, declined to be interviewed by investigators preparing the Justice Department report.
The revelations in the report prompted the Justice Department to tighten rules about exemptions to stay in costly hotels. …NYT