Sunday, May 6, 2012
Chris Christie's Closet
By desnuda | April 3rd, 2009 - 10:45am
Chris Christie has a number of issues that will emerge from his closet during both this primary and the general election should he make it that far. One of them will be a situation involving his brother Todd Christie.
Todd Christie was the president of the Wall Street trading firm,Spear, Leeds & Kellogg. While Chris Christie was starting to make noise about running for Governor, the contributions from Todd Christie to various Republican causes went from a few thousand to over $400,000.00.
This amount of money was spread around on a large scale. He not only opened his own checkbook, according to newspaper articles he teamed up with his brother’s current campaign spokesman, Bill Palatucci, and current campaign fundraiser, Jon Hanson, to raise money for the George W. Bush’s campaign. Together, the three were after Bush’s “Super Ranger” status.
How did Todd Christie afford this political largesse? That’s easy; there are news reports about how he sold his firm for $100 million to Goldman Sachs. Yes, that Goldman Sachs – same as Jon Corzine. Remember that next time Chris Christie condemns Wall Street.
Todd Christie became a major player at Goldman Sachs, and specialized in trading AOL, IBM and AIG stocks.
During this time he was nominated for a seat on the NY Stock Exchange board, one of the most prestigious positions for a Wall Street trader. But something happened along the way. He abruptly withdrew his nomination for the seat on the stock exchange board and resigned from Goldman Sachs. Why?
Well, it seems that Todd Christie was among 20 Wall Street specialists accused of fraudulent trading practices. “The conduct here was quite egregious,” said David Rosenthal, an associate regional director for the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Christie was one of the worst.”
According to the SEC, Todd Christie committed more that 1,600 improper trades between January 1999 and March 2003, generating “riskless profits” of more than $1.59 million for Spear Leeds (his own company) and costing investors $1.4 million. Fifteen of the 20 specialists facing civil charges were also charged with allegedly ripping off investors to the tune of $19,000,000.00, in the biggest crackdown on illegal trading in the Big Board’s History.
As it related to Todd Christie, 3 people above him and the 11 below him were all indicted. What is amazing to note is that one of the indictments was for someone who profited to the tune of $14,000.00 while Todd Christie, who profited to the tune of $1,590,000.00 was never indicted. In fact, perhaps the most amazing thing of all was that Todd Christie was #4 on the list of the top 15 and yet he was the only one of the top 15 not to be indicted. According to the SEC, Todd Christie committed more that 1,600 improper trades. So he gets off. There is a lot more to this story. So much more, and it is far too lengthy to post in this space.
It includes the multi-million, no bid federal monitoring contract that Chris Christie gave to David Kelly, the prosecutor who didn’t indict Todd Christie a short time before. There are appearances made by Chris Christie’s mentor Herbert Stern and Chris Christie’s boss, former US Attorney John Ashcroft.
I realize that there are people who you can’t confuse with facts once they make up their minds. No one should have this information kept from them. This is a way of helping people make up their own minds about those running for office. Full disclosure is the only way to know about our candidates and an informed electorate will ultimately give us the best and more qualified candidates. And there are major questions here that have to be answered.
The Chairman of the Judiciary Committees of both the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives have called for hearings into the awarding of these monitoring contracts. Congressman Frank Pallone has recently introduced legislation in Congress to do away with the ability of Federal Prosecutors to award these contracts.
The Pallone bill would have the attorney general issue written guidelines for future deferred prosecution agreements, have federal judges and not prosecutors select the monitors, have a standardized fee schedule for the monitors, and require public reporting of the monitors' fees and activities. Christie dismissed the legislation, saying, "This is all just made-up political stuff by people who want to play gubernatorial politics."
Well, if you want to see exactly how made up this “stuff is, consider the following: what was stated previously, is only part of the story. For the full story and all of the documentationgo to, www.thepublicneedstoknow.com, and click on the tab titled, “Chris Christie’s Closet”. There you will find out just how made up it really is and you can read “the rest of the story”!
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