Bridget Kelly Will Apparently Spill The Beans ....

[Laxman]

27. Just To Make Mr. Christie's Very Bad Day....

a little worse, Item #1 from the Christie Crime Digest is not quite dead yet.

New Scrutiny for Whistleblower Case

Though both parties reached a $1.5 million settlement earlier this month following years of costly litigation, a high-profile whistleblower case between a former Hunterdon County prosecutor and the administration of Gov. Chris Christie may yet get a closer look from members of the New Jersey legislature.

Assemblyman John McKeon (D-Morris), chairman of the lower house’s Judiciary Committee, called last week for a “full public airing” of details of the settlement, which ended a drawn-out legal battle between Ben Barlyn, a former assistant prosecutor, and the state. The case concerned Barlyn’s claim that he was wrongfully fired six years ago after speaking out against the Christie administration’s quashing of a set of indictments to help political allies.

McKeon also introduced a bill on Friday that would bar public entities and public employees from entering into the kind of confidential agreement on whistleblower lawsuits that Barlyn and the state reached, and which has kept much of case material — that was uncovered through the litigation — from being released.

“The very essence of the whistleblower statute is to encourage the public discourse of whether it was corruption or wrongdoing or whatever. It's counterintuitive that the litigation as part of a settlement should be stifled,” McKeon told NJ Spotlight.

The calls from the ranking lawmaker have the potential to shed more light on the recently-closed case, which began in 2010 after Barlyn complained that the withdrawal of indictments by then-Attorney General Paula Dow of three Republican law enforcement officials — Hunterdon County Sheriff Deborah Trout, Undersheriff Michael Russo, and former sheriff’s Investigator John Falat Jr. — was politically motivated.

All three had been indicted in May, 2010 on 43 counts of official misconduct, including failure to conduct proper background checks, forcing employees to sign loyalty oaths, and making a false law enforcement badge for Robert Hariri, the CEO at Celgene Cellular Therapeutics and prominent political donor who had given $6,800 to Christie's first gubernatorial campaign.

Barlyn, along with fellow assistant prosecutors Charles Ouslander and William McGovern, had presided over the investigation. But Barlyn said that his office was overridden, when Dow, in what many experts have since agreed was an unusual move, took over the case and three months later convinced a judge to dismiss the indictments, citing “legal and factual deficiencies.”

Eventually, Barlyn was suspended for “insubordination” and later fired for what the prosecutor’s office characterized as issues with job performance. But he’s maintained that it was his questioning of the quashed indictments, as well as his suspicion that they might have been motivated by Hariri’s connections with Christie or Trout’s friendship with Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, whose campaign she supported in 2009, that led to his removal.

The controversy made national headlines over the past several months and at one point looked like it might rise to the level of another high-profile corruption case: Bridgegate, the closing of commuter lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2013. Barlyn himself has pointed to parallels between that case and his own, arguing that both involve allegations of corruption at the bistate Port Authority and the misuse of political authority by the Christie administration.

He said his allegations implicate both Dow, who went on to a job at the Port Authority, and Christie’s former chief of staff Richard Bagger, who became an authority commissioner.

Read the rest here: http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/16/10/10/new-scrutiny-for-whistleblower-case-involving-christie-administration/