Outgoing Attorney General Christopher Porrino ends his tenure as attorney general.
Christopher Porrino was five days from starting his new job as chief counsel to the governor of New Jersey in January 2014 when the call came telling him he’d have to start early.
“I was asked if I could be up at Drumthwacket by noon,” Porrino said, referring to the governor’s mansion in Princeton.
Minutes earlier, news broke that aides to Gov. Chris Christie had ordered lanes closed on the George Washington Bridge in a political retaliation scheme that would blow up into a national news story.
“Sure,” he recalled saying. “Where’s Drumthwacket?”
A relative outsider, Porrino entered Christie’s inner circle at the moment the Bridgegate scandal was breaking, quickly becoming a trusted adviser to the Republican governor. His distance from the scheme helped Porrino — and perhaps the governor — avoid the fallout.
Aided by a reputation as a nonpartisan negotiator, he later won the support of Democratic lawmakers and served as New Jersey’s attorney general for 18 months.
He leaves the post this week along with his boss as Gov.-elect Phil Murphy takes office. Murphy has named Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir Grewal as his pick for the state’s top law enforcement job.
Porrino’s tenure was marked by a multi-front fight against opioids– a key priority of Christie’s — from charging doctors accused of unscrupulous overprescription to suing drugmakers and prosecuting drug dealers.
Under Porrino, the Attorney General’s Office also aggressively went after sex offenders and child pornography distributors, took on distracted driving, brought some high-profile discrimination cases, sought to reduce violent crime in New Jersey’s cities and created programs aimed at improving relations between police and the communities they serve.
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It also faced criticism because of Porrino’s close ties to the governor.
Christie’s controversial settlement with Exxon Mobil came under scrutiny when Porrino served as chief counsel, and a legal battle over the deal stretched on through his tenure as attorney general. Porrino had to recuse himself from matters related to the bridge scandal, which bubbled up again when Christie faced a citizen’s complaint for official misconduct.
More recently, there was the governor’s pre-Christmas pardon of an acquaintance, Joseph Longo, whom the Attorney General’s Office had prosecuted for records-tampering. Neither Porrino’s office nor the governor has commented publicly about the case, which resulted in a guilty plea three days before Porrino was nominated to his post.
In an interview at the attorney general’s Newark office, Porrino maintained that while the governor’s priorities drove policies at the Attorney General’s Office, as is the case in any administration, the office was not influenced by politics.
“In the 18 months I was here, there were really not circumstances that I was faced with that I felt I was being driven into a policy position I didn’t like or I really disagreed with,” he said.
As attorneys general in other mid-Atlantic states pursued aggressive stances against federal policies on immigration and civil rights since President Donald Trump took office, New Jersey sat on the sidelines.
But New Jersey is different than a lot of states, which elect their top prosecutors, rather than leaving it up to a governor to appoint and a state legislature to confirm them.
Some — including Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno during her unsuccessful run for governor — have argued that voters should pick the attorney general, but critics of that proposal argue interjecting electoral politics would complicate things even further.
“My approach has been, unless there was a legal issue that I thought we needed to take a position on, we tried to stay away from political fights,” he said.
Porrino said that if you went around and asked a hundred people who was the state’s attorney general, “a hundred wouldn’t know.” Yet the position comes with considerable power.
“You could not, given the current structure, have an elected attorney general, because the authority is so vast,” he said.
Porrino said the state Attorney General’s Office serves as “the lawyer for the governor’s office” when it comes to civil matters such as lawsuits.
“But on the criminal side, the AG’s office answers to nobody,” he said.
When Christie becomes a private citizen on Tuesday, Porrino, too, plans to return to civilian life. Porrino, who spent 20 years in private practice before joining state government, will return to his old law firm, Lowenstein Sandler, as its head of litigation.
He said one of the proudest moments of his tenure was the office’s Division on Civil Rights taking on the Bergen County town of Mahwah for their efforts to fight eruvs, Orthodox Jewish markers, and other policies that allegedly discriminated against Jews.
The legal fight caused an uproar, and Porrino said he received phone calls from people irate at the state for going after the town, which argued the markers violated zoning laws. He compared the calls, which he said complained about the spread of orthodox communities throughout New Jersey, to “the way they talked about African-American people 60 or 70 years ago” in housing disputes.
“I don’t understand how it’s any different, people who say, ‘Oh, they’re taking over,'” Porrino said. “How can you even say that out loud?
“It’s the great part of being able, in this job, to do what you think is right for the right reasons, and not having to worry about whether you’re going to get elected,” Porrino said.
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/01/porrino_exit_interview.html