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      Arraigned, Again: Trump’s Federal Court Hearing in Miami

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      Michael Simon Johnson, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Diana Nguyen, Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicDonald Trump was arraigned in Miami yesterday on 37 criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law, including the handling of classified documents.Three New York Times journalists covered the proceedings: Glenn Thrush was inside the courtroom, Luke Broadwater reported from outside the courthouse, and Maggie Haberman was at Mr. Trump’s home in Bedminster, N.J.On today’s episodeLuke Broadwater, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Glenn Thrush, who covers the Department of Justice for The New York Times.Maggie Haberman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Donald Trump boarding a plane in Miami after making his court appearance. “I did everything right and they indicted me,” he said in a speech after his arraignment.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingMr. Trump, now twice indicted since leaving the White House, surrendered to federal authorities in Miami and pleaded not guilty, striking a defiant tone afterward.On the calendar for Mr. Trump, the Republicans’ 2024 front-runner: rallies and primaries mixed with court dates.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Luke Broadwater More

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      What to Know About Chris Christie as He Enters 2024 Presidential Race

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      Mr. Christie, a onetime star presidential recruit who finished in sixth place in New Hampshire in 2016, has become a fierce Trump critic.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who announced a second campaign for president on Tuesday after a disappointing run in 2016, has had a roller coaster of a political career in more ways than one.In the span of four years, he went from star presidential recruit to scandal-dogged sixth-place finisher in New Hampshire. In the next seven, he went from serving as one of Donald J. Trump’s most influential advisers to advertising himself as the only candidate brave enough to denounce Mr. Trump to his face.Here are five things to know about Mr. Christie.He had a meteoric rise in his first term as governor …Mr. Christie first drew national attention in 2009, when he was elected governor of New Jersey over a Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine.He quickly notched legislative victories for Republicans in a Democratic-leaning state, including passing a major overhaul of New Jersey’s public employee pension system.Making use of a tactic that is now commonplace but was more striking at the time, he also attacked critics at public events — in 2012, he told a law student who had heckled him that if “you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end’s going to be thrown in jail, idiot.” His showmanship and combativeness made him appealing both to Republican voters and to party operatives, who began urging him to run for president in 2012.He didn’t, choosing instead to give the keynote address for Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention, become the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and establish himself as an early front-runner for 2016.His profile rose further after his management of the state’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when he famously welcomed President Barack Obama to New Jersey — an image that infuriated some Republicans but helped cement Mr. Christie’s reputation as someone who could switch modes from attack dog to bipartisan statesman as needed.… and a ‘Bridgegate’-fueled crash in his second term.If Mr. Christie’s first term as governor was politically triumphant, his second term was politically calamitous because of a scandal that became known as Bridgegate.In September 2013, not long before Mr. Christie was up for re-election as governor, high-ranking officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates bridges and tunnels between the two states, closed two of three lanes onto the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. The closings caused chaos.The ostensible rationale was to study traffic patterns. But it soon emerged that a Christie ally at the Port Authority had ordered the closings as part of a scheme to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing the governor’s re-election campaign — and that he had done so after Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff emailed him, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” In a trial in 2016 against the deputy chief of staff and a Port Authority official, a witness testified that Mr. Christie himself had been told of the political reason for the closings while they were happening, and had laughed.Mr. Christie denied involvement in the scandal, but it consumed his second term and proved a serious liability in his first presidential campaign. By the time he left office, he had the lowest approval rating recorded for any New Jersey governor.A campaign event in New Hampshire for Mr. Christie’s 2016 presidential run. Mr. Christie never gained much traction then — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump.Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York TimesHis 2016 campaign served to knock out Marco Rubio.Mr. Christie first ran for president in 2016, a year that made mincemeat of quite a few Republicans seen as rising stars in the party, and he was no exception.He never gained much traction — against any of his competitors, much less Mr. Trump — and came in sixth in the New Hampshire primary after focusing his efforts there. He dropped out the next day.But Mr. Christie did have a significant impact on the trajectory of the Republican race, just not to his own benefit.He helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s nomination by wounding the man who had looked to be his strongest opponent: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.In a debate in New Hampshire in early February, Mr. Christie went after Mr. Rubio mercilessly — accusing him of being inauthentic and relying on canned lines, a criticism Mr. Rubio lent credence to by responding with canned lines. (“There it is, everybody,” Mr. Christie replied.) The attack was so effective that the debate audience began to boo Mr. Rubio.Mr. Christie and Donald Trump ahead of a Trump rally in 2016.Mark Makela for The New York TimesHe was a member of Trump’s inner circle for years …After ending his own campaign, Mr. Christie quickly endorsed Mr. Trump, praising him for “rewriting the playbook of American politics.” His endorsement was a big deal given that most of the Republican establishment was still trying to find anyone other than Mr. Trump to coalesce around.Mr. Christie became a highly influential adviser to the Trump campaign. In characteristically combative fashion, he defended Mr. Trump even when he went too far for other Republicans.Implicit in the alliance was that Mr. Christie would get a high-ranking job in the Trump administration, perhaps even the vice presidency. But while Mr. Trump chose him to lead his presidential transition team and offered him cabinet posts, Mr. Christie did not get the job he really wanted: attorney general.Even so, he stayed loyal, helping Mr. Trump with debate preparation in 2020. He did not break away until Mr. Trump tried to overturn his election loss — at which point Mr. Christie began speaking forcefully, including in a book.Mr. Christie greets voters and students at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., earlier this year.Holly Ramer/Associated Press… but has reinvented himself as Trump Enemy No. 1.Mr. Christie is pitching himself as the only candidate willing to confront Mr. Trump head-on. (Though Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has begun to do that, other candidates largely have not, lest they alienate the pro-Trump Republican base.)In a pre-campaign stop in New Hampshire in March, Mr. Christie tried to convince voters that he was the man to do this by evoking his long-ago brawl with Mr. Rubio: “You better have somebody on that stage who can do to him what I did to Marco,” he said.Voters remain unconvinced. In a recent Monmouth University poll, Mr. Christie was the only candidate or potential candidate with a net-negative approval rating among Republicans — only 21 percent of whom viewed him favorably, compared with 47 percent who viewed him unfavorably.Mr. Christie said in New Hampshire in April: “I don’t think that anybody is going to beat Donald Trump by sidling up to him, playing footsie with him and pretending that you’re almost like him.”But the fact that he supported Mr. Trump throughout his presidency went unmentioned until a teenager asked a question: Given his denunciations of Mr. Trump for undermining democracy, did he still believe Mr. Trump had been a better choice than Mrs. Clinton?“I still would’ve picked Trump,” Mr. Christie acknowledged. More

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      Chris Christie, ex-New Jersey governor, launches 2024 presidential run

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      The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie has confirmed his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next year.Christie filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday afternoon. He was scheduled to announce his presidential run hours later in a town hall hosted at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, New Hampshire.The pugilistic politician joins the primary as a rank outsider but promises a campaign with a singular focus: to take the fight to Donald Trump, the former president who left office in disgrace after the January 6 attack on Congress but who is the clear frontrunner to face Joe Biden again at the polls.Such is Trump’s dominance of Republican polling – in which he leads his closest challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by wide margins – others in the field have been slow to turn their fire Trump’s way.Declared but low-polling candidates include the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur.While Christie has insisted he is “not a paid assassin”, the 60-year-old is certainly a seasoned brawler.Christie’s claims to fame include leaving office in New Jersey amid a scandal about political payback involving traffic on the George Washington Bridge to New York, then leaving the Florida senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign in pieces after a debate-stage clash for the ages.Christie was quick to drop out of that campaign, then equally quick to endorse the clear frontrunner. He stayed loyal despite a brutal firing as Trump’s transition coordinator, fueled by old enmities with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and only broke from Trump after the Capitol attack.Recently, Christie has worked for ABC News as a political analyst, honing his turn of phrase. Speaking to Politico, he insisted he was serious about winning the primary.“I’m not a paid assassin,” he said. “When you’re waking up for your 45th morning at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester [New Hampshire], you better think you can win, because that walk from the bed to the shower, if you don’t think you can win, it’s hard.”He also said Trump “needs to be called out and … needs to be called out by somebody who knows him. Nobody knows Donald Trump better than I do.”Trump has taken practice swings of his own.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hear Chris Christie’s coming in,” Trump told Fox News at an Iowa town hall. “He was at 6% in New Jersey … I love New Jersey, but 6% approval rating in New Jersey. What’s the purpose? And he’s polling at zero.”Most observers think Christie’s second presidential campaign will struggle to last even as long as his first. But not all think he will drop out without leaving his mark.In the Washington Post, columnist Jennifer Rubin said Christie, having followed Trump then abandoned him, “can help create a rationale (what psychologists call a ‘permission structure’) that allows Republicans who voted for Trump to move on”.Rubin also said Christie could be a “truth-teller who can force Republicans to confront reality … and, as a bonus, Christie might be just the right person to take down the other bully in the race: DeSantis.” More

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      Can Christie Succeed as ‘Trump Slayer’? New Jersey Has Thoughts.

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      The former governor, with his ready wit and considerable baggage, intends to jump into the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday.Chris Christie left office in New Jersey with abysmal popularity ratings. His 2016 presidential run was a short-lived flop. He has a reputation as a bully and is perhaps best known for a notorious political retribution scheme called Bridgegate.But as Mr. Christie, a two-term governor and former federal prosecutor, prepares to wade into the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, voters who know him best appear open to his underdog rematch with former President Donald J. Trump, if only for its potential as a grab-the-popcorn thriller.A one-on-one debate between Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie “would have more viewers than the Super Bowl,” said Jon Bramnick, a Republican state senator who moonlights as a standup comic.“Trump may be able to call you a name,” he said. “But Christie will take that name, twist it and come back with three or four things that will leave Trump lying down waiting for the count.”Any race that pits Mr. Christie against Mr. Trump is bound to be especially personal. Mr. Trump seemed to find joy in belittling Mr. Christie from the White House; Mr. Christie blamed Mr. Trump for giving him a bout of Covid that left him gravely ill and hospitalized.In interviews with New Jersey voters, Mr. Christie’s assets and liabilities were repeatedly described as two sides of the same coin.To moderates thirsty for a centrist voice: He is not Mr. Trump.And to Trump loyalists who might prefer that Mr. Christie retreat permanently to his beach house in Bay Head, it was much the same refrain: He is not Mr. Trump.“Anybody in the mix who’s not Trump is good,” David Philips, 64, said Friday during his lunch break in Trenton, the capital, where he has worked as a state construction official for 20 years. He said he tended to vote for Democrats and was never a big fan of Mr. Christie.“But he’s a reasonable guy compared to Trump,” Mr. Philips said.After dropping out of the 2016 presidential contest, Mr. Christie became one of Mr. Trump’s biggest boosters. But he is now positioning himself as the teller of hard Trump truths — a perhaps unlikely messenger with a message that will be challenging to sell to a party full of Trump supporters.Mr. Christie’s entry into the race comes less than six years after he left Trenton with an approval rating of just 15 percent, according to two polls taken during his last summer in office. At the time, it was the worst rating of any governor in any state surveyed by Quinnipiac University in more than 20 years.Last month, a Monmouth University poll of 655 Republican-leaning voters nationwide showed Mr. Christie with unfavorable ratings of 47 percent, higher than any other official or likely Republican presidential candidate.Jeanette Hoffman, a New Jersey Republican strategist, predicted that Mr. Christie would cast himself as the candidate best positioned to be “the Trump slayer.”“This whole tell-it-like-it-is strategy — he’s going to double down on that,” she said.Still, she acknowledged that the odds against him were long.Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie, 60, is famously combative. And many of his most memorable clashes are well documented.There was the time he was filmed shouting down a heckler on a Jersey Shore boardwalk while holding an ice cream cone.Memes linger from 2017, when he was photographed lounging with his family on a state-run beach closed to the general public over Fourth of July weekend because he and the Legislature had failed to approve a spending plan for the fiscal year.Mr. Christie, far right, was photographed at Island Beach State Park in 2017 while it was closed to the public.Andrew Mills/NJ Advance Media, via Associated PressAnd it was clear that his baseball days were behind him in 2015 when he took the field at Yankee Stadium for a charity game wearing a Mets uniform during his second term as governor. But he also earned widespread kudos that night, and an M.V.P. award, for having the guts to step into the batter’s box in the first place.For those in New Jersey cheering on his presidential run, that in-your-face chutzpah remains a key selling point.Even detractors express grudging respect for the former governor’s willingness to flex his political and rhetorical muscles.“He’s an audacious guy,” said Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., where two of the George Washington Bridge’s three lanes were closed down for four days in 2013 as part of a plot that endangered public safety and became known as Bridgegate. “He’s a man who speaks his mind, and I think in today’s day and age you do need that.”The 2013 “Bridgegate” scandal remains well known to voters. Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesStill, Mr. Sokolich said there was no way he would ever vote for Mr. Christie.“If he was ever to reach the office of the presidency, I just hope his talents for selecting people for high-level positions have improved,” Mr. Sokolich said, referring to a Christie aide who unleashed havoc on the borough’s roadways with an email: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”Mr. Christie was never accused of criminal wrongdoing, and the convictions of two aides were overturned in 2020 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the plot, designed to punish a political opponent, was an abuse of power but not a federal crime.David Wildstein, who admitted to being an architect of the traffic gridlock while working at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has known Mr. Christie since the two attended Livingston High School. He was the star witness at the trial, testifying that Mr. Christie was told about the bridge plan two days after the lane closures began and that he laughed approvingly. Mr. Christie has maintained that he had nothing to do with the closings.Mr. Wildstein, in an interview, characterized his onetime ally as a cartoonlike character.“He’s the guy who stands on the sidelines at a Little League game and yells at the umpire,” said Mr. Wildstein, 61, whose guilty plea was vacated in 2020 after the Supreme Court ruling and who now runs the New Jersey Globe, a popular political news site in New Jersey.But, he added, “It would be crazy for anybody to definitively say somebody can’t win.”Mr. Christie appeared with Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia at an election rally in Atlanta in 2022.Audra Melton for The New York Times More

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      Sue Altman Will Run for Tom Kean Jr.’s House Seat in NJ

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      Sue Altman, the leader of a progressive organization in New Jersey, announced Wednesday that she would run for the House seat currently held by Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican.New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District was redrawn last year specifically to boost the chances of Republicans. It worked.Now, Democrats are trying to win back the seat. But rather than turn to a centrist who mirrors the conservative ethos of the region, the party appears to be coalescing around a candidate who for four years has been the face of New Jersey’s progressive left: Sue Altman.Ms. Altman, who leads the state’s liberal-leaning Working Families Alliance and is an ally of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, announced her candidacy Wednesday morning.“We’ve trained hard in New Jersey to fight corruption,” Ms. Altman, 41, said in an interview. “And I’m ready to turn these skills toward a bigger, much more urgent fight.”Last year, redistricting shored up the odds of victory for the incumbent party in 11 of New Jersey’s 12 congressional districts. The only incumbent to lose was Tom Malinowski, a two-term Democrat who represented the Seventh District, which stretches from one side of northern New Jersey to the other and takes in mainly suburban and rural communities.Tom Kean Jr., a former Republican state lawmaker and namesake of a well-liked governor, defeated Mr. Malinowski in November by 8,691 votes, or roughly three percentage points, to join Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s fractious, narrow majority in Washington.The seat has been identified as a key target of Democrats hoping to regain control of the House. Over Memorial Day weekend, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran an ad on a highway billboard that yoked Mr. Kean to former President Donald J. Trump, offering a peek at what is likely to be a nationwide strategy next year in races that coincide with the presidential contest.With a year and a half before the election, it is likely that additional Democratic challengers to Mr. Kean will emerge. But Ms. Altman’s early entry and name recognition gives her a clear edge in a race that even the state’s Democratic Party chairman, LeRoy J. Jones Jr., acknowledges will be an uphill fight.“Sue Altman is a formidable candidate — and so far the only candidate,” Mr. Jones said. “Without hearing from anyone else, Sue is in a position to make her case to ultimately be the Democratic nominee.”It is by some measures a counterintuitive choice. The candidate will be running from the left in a district where registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats by 16,000 voters.Harrison Neely, a top political adviser to Mr. Kean, said Ms. Altman represented the “most divisive and extreme aspects of the fringe of her party.”Mr. Neely said Mr. Kean’s focus on reducing the cost of living in New Jersey and his efforts to work across the aisle as a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus illustrated his “common-sense solutions to our national challenges.” He said he was confident Mr. Kean would be re-elected.Ms. Altman said she too intended to focus on making New Jersey more affordable, while stressing the importance of abortion rights, the environment and gun safety.“Moms and dads should not feel afraid to drop off kids at school, worried about a mass shooting,” she said. “We absolutely have to do something to stop it.” Ms. Altman grew up in Clinton, N.J., and now lives in Lambertville, both of which are in Hunterdon County, an affluent region known for its horse farms.A star high school and college basketball player, Ms. Altman also played at Oxford University while earning her M.B.A.Her organizing tactics have earned her a reputation as a firebrand willing to throw punches.She has led protest singalongs outside the offices of Representative Josh Gottheimer, a fellow Democrat, over his brinkmanship during negotiations over key pillars of President Biden’s infrastructure and social welfare agenda.She handed out fake million-dollar bills to mock George Norcross III, a longtime political power broker and frequent nemesis, and sparred with former Republican Gov. Chris Christie over school funding at a 2016 town hall.“Pity the policy staffer whose job it is to explain something to Sue Altman,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist based in Washington with two decades of experience with campaigns in New Jersey.“Even her detractors, her adversaries, would say she is incredibly smart on the issues.”Robert Torricelli, a Democrat who lives in the Seventh District and represented New Jersey in both chambers of Congress, said he anticipated the race would be one of the premier nationwide matchups as Democrats work to chip away at the Republicans’ House majority.“I actually think she’s exactly the right contrast to Tom Kean,” said Mr. Torricelli, who was influential in selecting candidates to run for Congress when he led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee between 1999 and 2001. “Sue brings enormous energy.”Mr. Torricelli said Ms. Altman’s anti-establishment résumé and her ability to appeal directly to women were likely to gain traction in a district filled with independent-minded voters.“This is the kind of district where people think they’re Republicans,” he added. “But they’re also pro-environment, pro-choice and culturally progressive.” More

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      Muslim mayor turned away from White House Eid event: ‘There is a secret list’

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      The US Secret Service denied security clearance for Mohamed Khairullah, the longest-serving Muslim mayor in New Jersey, and prevented him from attending a White House Eid al-Fitr event on Monday afternoon marking the end of Ramadan.Khairullah, who was critical of the Trump administration’s travel ban in 2017 that restricted entry to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries, received the call from the Secret Service while he was en route to the White House. President Joe Biden revoked that ban in 2021.“It’s disappointing and it’s shocking that this continues to happen under our constitution which provides that everyone is innocent unless proven guilty,” Khairullah, 47, told NewJersey.com. “I honestly don’t know what my charge, if you want to put it that way, is at this point, to be treated in such a manner.”In a statement to the newspaper, United States Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairullah was denied entry to the event on Monday night, regretting “any inconvenience this may have caused” and noting that they were unable to “comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House”.Two days earlier, Khairullah, who has been mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, a small town of 6,000 people, for more than 17 years, appeared alongside the state’s governor, Phil Murphy, at the gubernatorial mansion for an Eid celebration.Khairullah, who was born in Syria before fleeing persecution as a teenager and moving to the United States with his parents in the 1990s, served as a volunteer firefighter and delivered humanitarian aid to refugees in Syria and Bangladesh for the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation. In 2019, Khairullah had been detained for three hours at John F Kennedy international airport after he returned from a trip to Turkey with his family.Khairullah told NewJersey.com that he sought out more information from federal officials on why he was detained but they would not disclose their reasoning. After he informed the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of what happened, the group reviewed a leaked copy of the federal terrorist screening dataset, which contains details on more than 1 million people suspected of being involved in terrorist activities, and informed him that his name and birthdate appeared in it.The Council on American-Islamic Relations has criticized the list for containing “almost entirely lists of Arabic and Muslim names” and called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI from spreading information from that terrorism dataset. Representatives for the group condemned the White House’s denial of entry to Khairullah, with the New Jersey chapter’s executive director, Selaedin Maksut, describing it as “wholly unacceptable and insulting”.“If these such incidents are happening to high-profile and well-respected American-Muslim figures like Mayor Khairullah, this then begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who do not have the access and visibility that the mayor has?” Maksut told the local New Jersey news outlet.Khairullah lamented that he could not enter the “People’s House”, telling NewJersey.com that “there is a secret list I can’t clear my name from and it still haunts me and follows me where I go”.“It’s not a matter of ‘I didn’t get to go to a party.’ It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity,” Khairullah added to Al Jazeera. “And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.” More

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      New Jersey Gov. Murphy Signs Bill That Reshapes Campaign Finance Laws

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      The bill doubles New Jersey’s campaign contribution limits and quashes investigations by a watchdog agency.In January, a watchdog agency created 50 years ago to safeguard the integrity of campaign fund-raising in New Jersey filed four complaints. Three cited irregularities in powerful Democrat-led accounts, and one dinged a committee set up to elect Republicans.All of the complaints had the potential to result in hefty fines. And all of them vanished Monday afternoon when the governor, Philip D. Murphy, signed a controversial bill that fundamentally reshapes New Jersey’s campaign finance laws.The bill, which narrowly cleared the State Legislature last week, began as a way to double donation limits to candidates and to require some so-called dark money fund-raising groups to disclose large donors, whose identities are currently secret.But as the legislation moved through Trenton, where Democrats control the Assembly and Senate, amendments were added that make it harder to rein in — or police — campaign spending.One change gives Mr. Murphy an easier way to replace the executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, known as ELEC. Another lets state and county political committees collect contributions to pay for operating expenses — funds that Philip Hensley, a policy analyst for the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, has decried as unregulated “slush money.”And a third alteration to the bill slashes the time for investigating allegations of impropriety to two years, down from 10. The change is retroactive, and the four complaints filed in January, which stem from fund-raising done in 2017, will be quashed, along with an estimated 80 percent of the agency’s other open investigations, officials have said.On Monday afternoon, the governor’s office sent an email that noted he had signed the bill, but it offered no additional comment.The overhaul of New Jersey’s campaign finance rules comes 13 years after a United States Supreme Court ruling in favor of Citizens United unleashed limitless federal spending by corporations and unions. Since then, some Republican and Democrat-led states have also taken steps to curb the enforcement powers of agencies set up to limit the influence of money in government. “At a time when people everywhere are concerned about the health of democracy in our country,” Mr. Hensley said, “this is just the antithesis of good government.”He called New Jersey’s new law a “frontal assault on some of the rules that have protected good government.”After the bill passed, the election agency’s three commissioners — two Democrats and one Republican — resigned in protest. The fourth seat on the board had been vacant.Stephen M. Holden, a Democrat and former state judge who quit the board last week, called the legislation a “transparent abuse of power.”“It eviscerates our authority and independence,” he said.The two-year time clock for investigations will start at the moment an infraction occurs. But allegations of impropriety rarely surface until at least six months to a year after an election, Mr. Holden said.“If we didn’t get to you within two years, you’re home free,” he said ruefully.Nicholas Scutari, the Democratic president of the State Senate and a sponsor of the bill, has defended the altered statute of limitations, likening the 10-year time frame to a police officer writing a ticket long after a traffic infraction.The agency’s executive director, Jeffrey M. Brindle, had argued that a five-year window would be appropriate, bringing New Jersey in line with many other states.Opponents of the bill said that the two-year statute of limitations was a bald political effort to quash pending investigations and to be free of risk from any as-yet-undiscovered campaign finance violations that took place before April 2021.“What is in those previous eight years yet to be investigated that they don’t want to be investigated?” asked Assemblyman Brian Bergen, a Republican and one of the most vocal opponents of the bill.“Just wiping it off the books? This doesn’t pass the sniff test,” he added.He found rare common cause with many of the state’s left-leaning advocacy organizations, which fought for over a month against the bill.“It rolls back decades of reform,” Mr. Bergen said.The bill became intertwined with the Murphy administration’s efforts to remove Mr. Brindle from a job he has held for 14 years after the discovery of an email he wrote, which the attorney general’s office later concluded was “demeaning” to members of the gay community.Mr. Brindle has since sued the governor and several aides for what his lawyer has said was an effort to extort Mr. Brindle’s resignation by threatening to publicize the email. Mr. Murphy’s spokesman has said that Mr. Brindle was never threatened.The new law gives Mr. Murphy 90 days to appoint an entirely new four-person election board, circumventing the traditional approval needed from the State Senate. The commissioners, who are empowered to hire and fire the agency’s executive director, would also be paid a $30,000 annual stipend.In Mr. Murphy’s most recent comments about the legislation, during a March 22 radio broadcast, the governor declined to discuss the merits of the bill, instead noting that his administration had expanded voting access over the last several years.“Anything that we believe is on the side of transparency that is responsible, that opens up democracy, that shines a light as opposed to the opposite, assume that we’re going to be for it,” he said, noting that at the time, the bill was still being amended. “I think we wait and see what the final, what this looks like as it iterates.” More