Bill Stepien's Integrity Hustle

He avoided indictment in Bridgegate and expressed disgust to the January 6 House committee at Trump's claims of election fraud. But he's collected $140k of the cash Trump raised to Stop the Steal.

Lives anyone more adept at tiptoeing away from political scandal than Bill Stepien?

First came Bridgegate. Stepien was identified by David Wildstein, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s second-highest-ranking appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as being an early collaborator on Wildstein’s scheme to close two of three lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge. That’s hardly surprising, given that Stepien was Christie’s campaign manager, and that the closures, which lasted five days, were made solely to punish Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor for failing to support the Republican Christie in that year’s gubernatorial election. Wildstein pled guilty to two counts of federal conspiracy. Stepien’s ex-lover and successor as Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy, along with Bill Baroni, Christie’s highest-ranking appointee to the Port Authority, though the Supreme Court later threw out both convictions. Christie (who almost certainly was in on this political stunt as well) judged Stepien sufficiently compromised ("If I cannot trust someone's judgment, I cannot ask others to do so”) that he cut him loose. Citing a federal criminal investigation and his Fifth amendment rights, Stepien successfully resisted a legislative subpoena for documents related to the scandal. But Stepien was never indicted. He wasn’t even asked to testify.

The Bridgegate stink didn’t bother Donald Trump, who hired Stepien to work on his 2016 campaign and in 2020 made him campaign manager (after firing Brad Parscale in July). But Trump’s 2020 campaign became a scandal, too, after the votes were counted, when Trump tried to overturn the election results. Stepien’s subsequent testimony before the House select committee on January 6 emphasized that he told Trump the people who encouraged him to challenge the election results were deceiving him. Stepien’s sanctimonious posturing was such a work of art that I will quote it at length here:

Q: And it was important for you, Mr. Stepien, to pull back for your own professional reputation? You didn't want to be associated with some of what you were hearing from the Giuliani team and others that sort of stepped in in the wake of your departure?

A: I didn't mind being categorized. There were two groups…. We called them kind of my team and Rudy's team. I didn't mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal, as reporters kind of started to do around that point in time.

…

I've been doing this for a long time, 25 years. And I've spanned political ideologies from Trump to McCain to Bush to Christie, you know. And I can work under a lot of circumstances for a lot of varied candidates and politicians. But a situation where—and I think along the way, I've built up a pretty good—I hope—a good reputation for being honest and professional. And I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So that led to me stepping away.

Try not to get too distracted by Stepien’s absurd claim that after Bridgegate he had “a good reputation for being honest and professional.” The point here is that Stepien told the select committee he wanted nothing to do with this Stop the Steal nonsense and that he stepped away.

He didn’t step away. As the Huffington Post’s S.V. Date and Jennifer Bendery pointed out in June, during the midterm election cycle Stepien took in “$1.2 million from an all-star cast of pro-Trump election liars, including $190,488 from Harriet Hageman,” who now occupies select committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney’s former seat in Congress. His firm, the HuffPo reported, raked in $130,000 from Trump’s Save America PAC, plus another $90,562 from MAGA PAC, the successor organization to the 2020 Trump campaign.

The Save America money is especially unclean. As the select committee’s final report makes clear—see Appendix Three (“The Big Rip-Off: Follow the Money,” starting p. 770)—nearly all the $250 million that Trump raised to challenge the 2020 results ended up in Save America, which by law is barred from spending more than $5000 to challenge the 2020 election results. So while Stepien stepped away from active participation in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, he did not step away from collecting what is now $140,000, according to the select committee, of the millions that Trump raised promising to overturn the 2020 election that can’t legally be spent for that purpose. Almost none of the $250 million Trump raised to contest the election ended up being spent to contest the election. The campaign to prove election fraud defrauded the fools who contributed money to it. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.