David Wildstein

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 counts of conspiracy as part of a plea agreement.

Wildstein grew up 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, a Republican, would later become 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.

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