Did Christie Go Easy on a Human Trafficker Just to Bust a Small-Time Pol?
The U.S. Attorney's office cut a deal with Medrano. She got a light sentence, and in return gave up information -- some of which was about a local politician that Christie would use to burnish his image as an enemy of corruption. The upshot was that a human trafficker got off easy, in part, so that Christie could jail a small-town mayor.
The deal, critics charge, was at best a bad one and at worst, a callous political move. Christie's defenders respond that it was a necessary move to help catch other criminals -- just another one of the unpleasant compromises that prosecutors are routinely forced to make in the name of justice. At the time of Medrano’s sentencing, Christie’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said Medrano assisted with the convictions of eight other people who part of the smuggling ring.
However, Medrano’s attorney, Gerald Shargel, told me that she “never testified about human smuggling” and court documents clearly state that “Luisa Medrano did not testify before the grand jury” regarding the human trafficking ring. The U.S. Attorney’s office would not provide information about what convictions Medrano allegedly assisted on, or how many. Reached for comment for this story, a spokesman for Governor Christie referred me to Drewniak’s 2009 statements.
Absent any concrete evidence to the contrary -- and there certainly could be some evidence that has yet to publicly emerge -- it appears that Christie’s office all-but-excused one human trafficker that he considered to be “vile” in order to convict someone for comparatively petty crimes.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/17/did-christie-go-easy-on-a-human-trafficker-just-to-bust-a-small-time-pol.html