Bombshell: How The Fix Was In On Christie's 'Stronger Than The Storm' Ad
Bombshell: How The Fix Was In On Christie's 'Stronger Than The Storm' Ad
Oh my. Looks like Michele Brown, Chris Christie's gal pal, didn't get away with handing him a free campaign ad, after all!
Alec MacGillis at The Atlantic takes another big chunk out of the Christie armor: How Michelle Brown, Christie's reputed gal pal, made sure the most expensive bid got the job:
Further raising the intrigue around the “Stronger than the Storm” ads has been the lengths to which the Christie administration has gone to keep secret the relevant documentation. When Shannon Morris, the president of the New Jersey company, Sigma Group, that came in second to MWW, last summer requested the state’s evaluations of the proposals to better understand why her firm had lost, she received almost nothing in response. “Typically when you have a state-run bid like that you have…it fully transparent, it’s all posted online,” Morris told me. “There was nothing like that in this case.”
When Asbury Park Press reporter Bob Jordan made an open-records request for the scoresheets that the selection committee members filled out to rank the ad proposals, the state returned to him in January the scoresheets—with the names of the committee members redacted.
Knowing this, I was heartened to find that my own request for the scoresheets was returned to me later in January with the names of the committee members fully disclosed. I planned to include details from the scoresheets in a cover story on Christiethat I was in the process of writing, but the piece’s main thrust veered away from the Sandy ads, and I decided to revisit that issue later.
This week, when I went to do just that, I discovered that the Internet link the Economic Development Authority had given me for the reams of documents I had requested was no longer operable. I asked that the documents be resent. They were, and lo, this time the names of the committee members were redacted from the scoresheets. When I asked the authority’s legal officer, Shane McDougall, about the discrepancy, he replied that “if the original documents had been disseminated without these redactions, it was done inadvertently.” He added that the redaction of names was done “on the basis of the advisory, consultative, and deliberative privilege, the expectation of privacy and the protection of the competitive bidding process.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117066/christies-stronger-storm-jersey-shore-post-sandy-ad-cover
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/bombshell-how-fix-was-christies-stronger
