David Wildstein (born September 1961) is an American businessman, Republican Party politician, political blogger, and the founder of the New Jersey political news website Politicker Network. A former mayor of Livingston, New Jersey, he served as a senior official in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey during the administration of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie until 2013, when Wildstein resigned in the midst of a scandal involving traffic lanes closures. On May 1, 2015, he pleaded guilty to two federal felony counts of conspiracy as part of a plea agreement, but his conviction was later overturned.
Early life and early political career
Wildstein grew up in a Jewish family in Livingston. He attended Livingston High School in the late 1970s, where he was a classmate (one year ahead) of future governor Chris Christie. Christie has said that although he knew who Wildstein was and that both of them had worked on Thomas Kean's campaign for governor in 1977, Christie and Wildstein were not close acquaintances in high school: "We didn't travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don't know what David was doing during that period of time." Christie and Wildstein were both members of the school's baseball team; Christie was a catcher, Wildstein was the team's statistician. In an interview published in 2014, the team's coach recalled that Wildstein was "a very quiet, unassuming, brilliant kid" with "a brilliant mind for numbers and figures" although not a skilled player.
Wildstein's lifelong involvement with politics began early. At age 12, he was mentioned by a local newspaper as having left a group backing one congressional candidate in order to throw his support behind the candidate's opponent, Thomas Kean Sr., then a member of the state Assembly and a neighbor of Wildstein. (Kean lost the Republican primary to Millicent Fenwick, but later became governor of New Jersey, serving from 1982 to 1990.) At 16, Wildstein filed a lawsuit in a failed attempt to get on the ballot as a member of the county Republican Committee. The following year, he ran in the local school board election, although he was legally too young to have served on the school board. Still a high school student at the time, Wildstein was accused by his social studies teacher of having deceptively encouraged his teacher to sign a letter of support that was published in the local newspaper. They later issued a joint statement describing the episode as a misunderstanding.
After graduating from high school, Wildstein attended college in Washington, D.C., working on a presidential campaign and as a political consultant while a student. He served as executive director of the New Jersey Legislature's Legislative Caucus on Israel to deal with Jewish-related foreign policy, according to a 1983 JTA report.
Over the course of his political career, he worked for a number of other New Jersey Republican politicians, including two congressmen, Chris Smith and Bob Franks.
At 23, he was elected to a four-year term on the town council, serving from 1985 to 1988. He then served as mayor of Livingston from 1987 to 1988. Some considered his personal style in local politics at the time aggressive and combative, and he alienated even some members of his own party. He was very outspoken on some issues, including his opposition to low-income housing in Livingston, which he said was wasting the county government's money. After placing poorly in a primary election, he vowed to stay out of local politics in the future.
He began working as a top executive in the family's Georgia-based textile manufacturing business, Apache Mills, one of the country's largest floor mat manufacturers. Wildstein worked at the company from 1988 to 2007.
PolitickerNJ.com and "Wally Edge" blog
In 2000, while still working at the family business, Wildstein secretly founded a New Jersey political news site called PoliticsNJ.com (since renamed PolitickerNJ.com), which he ran with the financial support of his friend New Jersey real estate mogul Jared Kushner, who publishes The New York Observer. Wildstein wrote a blog on New Jersey politics for the site using the pseudonym "Wally Edge", after the former New Jersey Republican governor and US senator Walter Edge. The site published news, political commentary, and rumors based on anonymous tips from government officials and political operatives. Wildstein's true identity as the blog's author was only revealed in 2010 when he was appointed by the Christie administration to work at Port Authority.