Paul Fishman, U.S. attorney for New Jersey, offers no wider opinion on Bridgegate

TRENTON - Chris Christie, then the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, declared in 2004 that an indictment of a fund-raiser for Gov. Jim McGreevey painted "a very vivid picture of the corrupt and broken political system in the state of New Jersey."

Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in January that corruption charges against New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver exposed "the very core of what ails Albany: lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and lack of principle joined with overabundance of greed, cronyism, and self-dealing."

Then there is Paul Fishman, the current United States attorney for New Jersey. In a high-profile case that has cast a shadow over Gov. Christie's likely run for president, Fishman on May 1 announced charges against three of the governor's former allies related to lane closures on the George Washington Bridge.

Fishman stuck to the indictment when he explained the charges. He made no sweeping assertions about a broader culture of corruption in Christie's administration or at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge.

"I don't comment on culture," he said wryly at one point. "That's not my expertise."

Fishman's limited commentary - and near-silence on the case during his 16-month investigation - underscores a striking contrast in style with his predecessor, Christie, and his Manhattan counterpart, Bharara.

Where Christie and Bharara, as prosecutors, have crusaded against public corruption, Fishman has taken a more textbook, deliberative approach.

At the May 1 news conference, Fishman summed up his job like this: "To figure out: A, what happened? B, is it a federal crime? C, who's responsible? And D, can we prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? That's it."

Those who know Fishman say this careful approach is informed by his background as a longtime federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney who has expressed no interest in seeking elective office or a judgeship.

"What you see in the Bridgegate thing, for example, he only charged those people whom he felt confident he could prove guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," said Lawrence Lustberg, a criminal-defense attorney with Gibbons P.C., who has known Fishman since they attended Hebrew school together.

Lustberg added: "There are other prosecutors, maybe [Gov. Christie] himself ironically, who would have proceeded with much broader strokes and perhaps charged a lot more people."

Fishman went to Princeton and Harvard Law, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating in 1982, he began his career clerking for the late Judge Edward R. Becker of the federal appellate court in Philadelphia.

He served as an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey from 1983 to 1994 and then as a senior adviser to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton administration.

He worked in private practice as a criminal defense lawyer for a decade, representing such clients as Carla Katz, a former state union leader, including in a civil case in which the New Jersey GOP chair sought release of her e-mails with Gov. Jon S. Corzine, her former boyfriend.

President Obama appointed Fishman to be New Jersey's top federal law enforcement officer in 2009. Since then, he has prosecuted public corruption, cybercrime, and organized crime, among other cases.

"Some prosecutors want to kill everybody, punish everybody at the same level. That's not really what the criminal law is designed to achieve," said Peter C. Harvey, a former state attorney general who worked with Fishman in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the mid-1980s under Samuel Alito, who's now a Supreme Court justice.

With Fishman, "you don't see 40-count indictments," Harvey said. "You take your best evidence, frame your best charges, and that's what you make the case on."

In adherence with Department of Justice standards, Fishman refuses to leak investigations to the media to "promote himself," Harvey said.

Where Fishman, 58, of Montclair, spent years climbing the ranks of the U.S. Attorney's Office, eventually serving as First Assistant U.S. Attorney to Michael Chertoff, who would become the first secretary of homeland security, Christie had no experience as a prosecutor before his appointment by President George W. Bush in 2002.

Christie, a Republican now considering running for president, had worked as a lawyer and lobbyist and helped win the post by raising money for Bush.

Career prosecutors were skeptical of Christie at first, but he won his colleagues' support through hard work and strong management, said a source who worked in the office but asked not to be named because of ongoing investigations.

As his office convicted public officials from Newark Mayor Sharpe James and Senate President John Lynch to municipal and county officials, Christie developed a reputation as a corruption-buster, which he would highlight in his 2009 campaign for governor.

The source called Christie an effective communicator who deftly courted the media in explaining the office's mission.

Christie wasn't afraid to ruffle feathers. At one point, he publicly called on McGreevey and Harvey, then attorney general, to step up their prosecutions of corruption.

And Christie publicly feuded with McGreevey, a Democrat, after McGreevey was implicated, but not charged, in an extortion case involving a top fund-raiser, David D'Amiano.

D'Amiano's indictment repeatedly referred to a "high-ranking state official" - McGreevey - alleging that he and others used code words like Machiavelli to signal support for a corrupt land deal.

McGreevey denounced the indictment as reading like a "political novel"; at the time, Christie hadn't ruled out a run for governor.

Like Christie, New York's Bharara has been unsparing in his criticism of state government.

A day after charging Silver, the Assembly speaker, in January, Bharara blasted Albany's "three men in a room" style of governance, consisting of the governor, Assembly speaker, and Senate majority leader.

Silver moved to dismiss the indictment, citing Bharara's public comments. A federal judge last month declined to dismiss but condemned the prosecutor for trying his case in the media.

"While castigating politicians in Albany for playing fast and loose with the ethical rules that govern their conduct," the judge wrote, Bharara "strayed so close to the edge of the rules governing his own conduct that" Silver had a "nonfrivolous argument."

Fishman, by contrast, has not spoken publicly about the bridge case since his May 1 news conference, when he announced a grand jury had indicted Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni.

The indictment alleges that Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, conspired with Baroni, a former Christie appointee at the Port Authority, and David Wildstein, another port official, to jam traffic approaching the bridge in September 2013 to punish a local mayor for failing to endorse Christie's reelection.

Wildstein pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and is cooperating with the government.

At the news conference, Fishman said that "based on the evidence available to us today," his office would not bring further charges in the case.

"I'm going as far as I believe I can ethically go in commenting on the state of the evidence and the state of our investigation," he said.

A reporter noted that Bharara had publicly discussed crime in New York's Statehouse and pressed Fishman about whether there was a culture of corruption in Christie's office or the Port Authority.

"It's not up to me and my office to make that judgment or to offer that opinion," Fishman replied, "with all due respect to my colleague across the river."