The Fort Lee mayor who Gov. Chris Christie said he wouldn’t be able to pick “out of a lineup” shared a steak lunch with the governor three years before the George Washington Bridge scandal.
Mayor Mark Sokolich said he and Christie began a relationship after the meal that included two Sokolich visits to holiday parties at the mansion and other brief but public encounters, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
The ties between Sokolich, a Democrat, and Republican Christie are a key to the scandal because of allegations the governor’s aides ordered crippling bridge lane closings to punish Sokolich for refusing to endorse the governor’s re-election.
At his Jan. 9 press conference Christie claimed Sokolich was a total stranger.
“Until I saw his picture last night on television, I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup,” Christie said. “The reason that the retribution idea never came into my head is because I never even knew that we were pursuing his endorsement.”
A Christie spokeswoman said in a statement of Sokolich’s new claims: “The governor had frequent meeting with mayors in 2010 around these issues.”
Sokolich said he had a clear memory of how his relationship with Christie began. The governor invited him for a lunch of beef tenderloin in a cream sauce with a salad at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, three years before, he said.
He said the meal was “very meaningful.”
“It’s not often you have a captive audience with the governor,” Sokolich told Bloomberg News.
He said Christie wanted to talk about his plans to cap property taxes. The governor was looking for support from Democrats.
“I was impressed. He was very focused,” Sokolich said. “We shared in common what we thought to be the biggest problems confronting New Jersey.”
He said Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, a fellow Democrat, also attended the lunch.
Meanwhile, Democratic state legislators who examined subpoenaed documents of officials linked to the lane closings said there are no smoking guns in what’s been turned over so far.
Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle of Englewood said after a three-hour view of the material Friday that “there are no revelations.”
But most of the material is still to come because the legislative committee looking into the lane closings granted deadline extensions.
With Post wire services