Port Authority Chairman David Samson — who notoriously brushed off the George Washington Bridge lane closings as a mere “inconvenience” — resigned on Friday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced.
The chairman’s resignation is “effective immediately,” and has nothing to do with Bridgegate, Christie insisted.
Instead, the governor said, the move is part of ushering in “a new era” at the PA that he hopes will include the authority being split into two agencies, one for New Jersey and one for New York.
“He’s 74 years old and he is tired. That’s what he told me. David has been discussing this with me for the better part of a year,” he said of Samson’s reason for retiring.
As Bridgegate unfolded — and evidence mounted that the traffic-snarling closures of were a product of petty political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ — Samson had seemed to sink to the occasion.
He criticized a decision by PA Executive Director Pat Foye to reopen the Fort Lee lanes after four days.
He also refused to cooperate in a taxpayer-funded probe ordered by Christie that concluded in a report issued Thursday that the governor had no role in the scandal.
“Those are decisions he had to make, whether I agree with it or not is a different matter,” Christie said of Samson, a close colleague who he’d appointed to the authority in 2010 .
The embattled governor announced the resignation at his first press conference since launching the much-criticized, internal probe of Bridgegate in January.
Christie spent part of the press conference defending the probe, which, predictably,averred that the governor had been blameless in the lane-closings scandal.
“I think the report will stand the test of time and it will be tested by the other investigations that are going on,” Christie said, referring to separate probes by federal prosecutors and a special legislative committee.
But the big news during the hour-long news conference was the departure of Samson, a former New Jersey Attorney General who Christie said he was convinced had nothing to do with the lane closings.
“I spoke to Samson on January 8th and asked him what he knew about [Bridgegate], whether he had any involvement, whether he authorized this … and he said ‘absolutely not.’ That rang true to me at the time,” Christie said, because Samson was not involved in the day-to-day, nuts and bolts of the authority’s operations.
Asked if Samson’s resignation had anything to do with accusations concerning his “overlapping businesses with the Port Authority,” Christie dismissed such overlaps as a product of people coming in from the private sector to work at public agencies.
Samson has been criticized for multiple overlaps between authority business and clients of his powerful law firm, Wolff & Samson.
“There has always been those type of connections and potential conflicts,” he said, calling the conflicts easily addressed via recusal.
“I trust that’s what he did,” Christie said. “That’s an issue for him to deal with directly. I have every trust and faith in David’s integrity.”
He added, “The only reason he stayed was that I asked him to.”
“I didn’t expect the [resignation] call, but it’s not a shock to me,” he said.
Samson’s post will be filled “in the short term” from within the current pool of five New Jersey members of the authority Board of Commissioners, until a permanent chairman can go through the legislative approval process, he said.