NEWARK, N.J. — Three former allies of Gov. Chris Christie were charged Friday in the George Washington Bridge traffic jam scandal that has cast a long shadow over Christie’s White House prospects, and one of them pleaded guilty.
Christie himself was not publicly implicated.
David Wildstein, an official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at the time of the tie-ups, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges and could face about two years in prison at sentencing Aug. 6.
In court, he said he and two other Christie loyalists closed lanes and engineered the traffic jams in September 2013 as political payback against a Democratic mayor, then concocted a cover story: They claimed it was all part of a traffic study.
The two people he implicated — former Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni, who was the governor’s top appointee at the Port Authority — were charged in an indictment unsealed later in the day.