An hour and a half into a Friday night town hall meeting at Fury’s Publick House in Dover, New Hampshire, when reporters had already started to pack up their gear, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took one last question from a self-described “old Jersey girl.” Eileen Sahagian said she accepted Christie’s explanation that he knew nothing about the George Washington Bridge lane closures, but something was still bothering her.
“People with whom you work very closely somehow got the idea that that was okay, and I’m worried about a president who has people around him who feel that that’s okay,” said Sahagian, an educator from Durham.
Calmly but emphatically, Christie told her he had cooperated with three exhaustive investigations. “And I’m moving on from it now, because I lived through 15 months of three investigations that have now confirmed everything I said 15 months ago,” he said.
But though federal prosecutors say they are finished with Bridgegate indictments, they aren’t finished looking into Christie appointees at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Sources familiar with the investigation say witnesses have been interviewed as recently as this month.
Interviews and records obtained by WNYC indicate that New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman is examining whether a sustained influence campaign by United Airlines paved the way for a deal to lower United’s flight fees at Newark Liberty Airport by tens of millions of dollars a year. United’s overtures included a special flight route that benefitted the Port Authority’s former chairman David Samson; campaign contributions; fancy lunches and dinners; and meetings with top officials, including Christie.
The deal was never consummated – it blew up in the wake of the burgeoning Bridgegate scandal. Last December, United filed a legal complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration over the fees, and the matter is currently being litigated.
United “Bet The Farm”
United – and Continental Airlines before it – worked for decades to become the dominant carrier at Newark Airport. United now runs 70 percent of the flights from Newark. It owns take-off and landing slots it doesn’t use, just so no one else can. “They bet the farm on Newark, and it’s worked for them,” says Steve Sigmund, a former Port Authority official and airport expert. For United, Newark is “a major profit center, internationally.”
Indeed, just last month, despite historic snowfalls in the northeast that produced cancellations and delays, United reported its most profitable first quarter ever.
A lot of recent profit in the airline industry has come from squeezing dollars from passengers who now have to pay for luggage, snacks and legroom. But there’s a particularly maddening cost that United can’t turn around and collect from passengers: the $120 million in flight fees it pays to the Port Authority for using the Newark airport. For historical and legal reasons, those costs are much higher than they are at JFK and La Guardia airports – 75 percent higher and 59 percent higher, respectively. Even though United signed leases accepting those fees, its sense of grievance over the inequity has grown in recent years, peaking in 2013, when new laws created higher costs for the Port Authority at the airports. Contractually, those costs are borne by the airlines.
“The Port Authority operates EWR for its own benefit, contrary to the interests of the traveling public and the aeronautical users of the airport, imposing excessive, unreasonable, and discriminatory charges to generate huge surpluses that are siphoned off to non-aeronatical operations,” United charged in its complaint to the FAA.
Pasta, Steak and Campaign Contributions
The airline began a sustained campaign to extract concessions from the Port Authority beginning in 2011, according to records, interviews and United’s own legal papers.
Almost immediately after Christie appointed David Samson as chairman in early 2011, according to former top Port Authority officials, Samson and the Port’s political staff began meeting with United officials privately, shutting out the professional aviation staff. Included in some of those meetings were Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, since charged by federal prosecutors as two of the Bridgegate co-conspirators.
In September 2011, records show, Samson and Baroni sat down for dinner with Jeff Smisek, United’s CEO, for dinner at Novita, a haute Italian restaurant in Grammercy Park. According to Bloomberg News, Samson began to complain at that dinner “that he and his wife had grown weary of the trip to their weekend home in Aiken, South Carolina, because the best flight out of Newark was to Charlotte, North Carolina.” Previously, Continental had run a direct route to Columbia, South Carolina, 100 miles closer to the Samson home. But that route had been discontinued.
And then, as Bloomberg reported, “in a tone described by one observer as ‘playful, but not joking’ Samson asked: Could United revive that route?”
United initially balked, Bloomberg wrote, but after Samson threatened to delay a Port Authority board item of interest to United, the flight was launched. The agenda item was a vote to spend $10 million on a new hangar at Newark. It was not held up.
Samson attorney Michael Chertoff, the former chief of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the Bloomberg story “badly mischaracterizes an initial meeting between business executives.”
Over the next three years, United continued to shower attention on Christie and his appointees at the Port Authority. The company gave $100,000 to Choose New Jersey, a business group that answers ultimately to Christie. Choose New Jersey tries to lure companies to the state. Among other things, the group funds Christie’s foreign trade missions, which are a mix of trade and campaigning.
United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy said the airline’s support is understandable, because promoting tourism and business in markets it serves is a priority. She also noted the company is a member of similar groups at other hubs, though she wouldn’t disclose membership fees for those groups.
Over one week in June 2013 – Christie’s re-election year – individual United managers gave $24,000 to his campaign; they’d never given anything like that before. McCarthy wouldn’t discuss the contributions.
That same week, United lobbyist Jamie Fox met with Christie’s top staffer at the Port Authority, Bill Baroni, who was then the deputy executive director. Fox, a close Samson friend, is now Christie’s transportation commissioner, and he is not taking questions about his work for United, a NJDOT spokesman said.
A Meeting with the Governor and a Deal at Hand
Two months later – in August 2013, three months before Christie was up for re-election – Smisek and Baroni met over lunch at Vic & Anthony’s steakhouse in Manhattan. Later that month, Smisek, Samson and Christie met. Shortly afterward, according to letters, calendar entries and interviews with people familiar with the talks, United worked quickly to secure a deal to lower the fees. By Nov. 13, a week after the election, a deal appeared to be at hand.
“We are grateful to the Port Authority leadership for being willing to address the long-standing inequity in flight fees paid by carriers serving the Newark airport and those serving the New York airports,” United’s Executive Vice President Nene Foxhall wrote in an email to Baroni. The email was accompanied by 12 detailed questions on how United’s cost would be lowered if it was given the same rate as carriers at JFK and La Guardia airports.
Just a few hours after that email was sent, Baroni, Christie, Samson and Smisek all met at Newark Airport for a press conference announcing that United would fly to Atlantic City, another cherished Christie goal, because of its potential for boosting business in the downtrodden gambling town, and its importance to the South Jersey political bosses.
But then everything fell apart.
On Monday Nov. 25, Baroni testified before the Assembly Transportation Committee about the growing scandal over politically-motivated lane closures at the George Washington Bridge. The testimony was contentious, heated and, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman now has charged, “false and misleading” – a central part of the co-conspirators’ cover-up of the Bridgegate scheme to punish politicians for failing to support Christie’s reelection. (Baroni says he is innocent.) Soon after the testimony, Wildstein and then Baroni resigned. Samson, under increasing scrutiny, receded from his operational role.
On Jan. 8, 2014, the New Jersey legislature released the now-infamous email, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” sent by a Christie staffer to Wildstein. Within weeks Nene Foxhall was back at the Port Authority trying to make sure United’s flight-fee deal would be honored, records show. But the airline’s friends were gone and the scrutiny on the Port Authority was too great, sources with knowledge of the negotiations said.
In March, Samson resigned. Three days later, United cancelled those direct flights between Newark and Columbia, South Carolina.
Yet for the next year, according to documents and legal papers, United continued to try to persuade the Port Authority to follow through. At the end of September, United requested a meeting “before October 15 to make one last attempt to resolve our differences.”
On Oct. 7, United gave a $10,000 donation to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie was leading. The organization funded travel that allowed him to build national name recognition and connections for a presidential campaign.
The Port Authority didn’t budge, maintaining that United was disregarding rules it had operated under for decades, and that United’s claims are “fatally flawed,” because the flight fees are set “pursuant to agreements to which United is a party.”
In November 2014, United cancelled its flights to Atlantic City. In the seven months it ran the flights, four of 12 Atlantic City casinos had been shut down.
In mid-December, United filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration, a 77-page legal howl that not only accuses the Port Authority of overcharging the airline, but itemizes what it describes as misdeeds that raised expenses at the agency, from cost overruns at the World Trade Center to funding repair work at the Pulaski Skyway.
In January of this year, according to bond disclosures, federal prosecutors in Newark subpoenaed the Port Authority, asking for United’s leases, records of the South Carolina flight, communications with United Airlines executives and lobbyists, and records of travel by Samson and his family. Multiple sources tell WNYC that in the months since, investigators have been actively questioning witnesses. The U.S. Attorney won’t comment. Baroni, Samson – and Christie – declined to comment, as well.
“Bill is unable to talk about the whole United issue as it’s something the U.S. Attorney is looking into,” said Baroni’s lawyer, Jonathan Miller.
