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- Since fate had placed Christie in New Jersey, he was about to get a very particular kind of political education. In his senior year, he was one of two students chosen to represent New Jersey in the Hearst Foundation’s Senate Youth Program. The students were to spend a week with their home-state senators, observing the legislative process from the inside out. Unfortunately for Christie and his partner, the day before they got to Washington, news broke of a massive FBI operation in which a federal agent posing as an Arab sheik had bribed elected officials with suitcases stuffed with cash.
Thus began the season of Abscam, the elaborate sting that would eventually reel in the mayor of Camden, six members of the House of Representatives, and New Jersey’s senior senator, Harrison Williams, among others. That week, Williams went to ground, and so, while all the other students got pictures in the group yearbook with both their senators, the Jersey kids only got a photo with one—Bill Bradley. “It was an incredible embarrassment,” Christie later recalled. “We were the butt of jokes all week.” In his telling, it was the defining moment that alerted him to “the problem of corruption in New Jersey.”