Congress still looking at Ashcroft's very lucrative no-bid legal work for former subordinate

On Thursday of last week, NJ GOP Gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie was called to testify before Congress about his practice of awarding no-bid contracts when he was US Attorney in New Jersey.  Christie is taking heat for his contracting decisions, especially for one contract awarded to former US Attorney General and Missouri Senator John Ashcroft.

In 2007, Achcroft's firm was awarded a no-bid contract by Christie to monitor a deferred prosecution settlement of a kickback case against Zimmer Holdings, a medical device maker.  The contract was worth between $27 million and $52 million, and the Ashcroft Consulting Group charged $1.5-$2.9 million every month for the job.  Amazingly, $750,000 was paid every month for the service of Ashcroft and two fellow bigwigs.

Not a bad government job, if you can get it.

This may also surprise you, but Christie was not excited to talk about these contracts with Congressional investigators last week.  It's hard to look like a holier-than-thou small-government kind of guy when your fellow partisans are making tens of millions of dollars for no-bid legal work. The New York and New Jersey press have been all over the story.  The Asbury Park Press (that's Bruce Springsteen country) has a good summary: 

Christie defends choice of Ashcroft for no-bid contract

Congressional Democrats on Thursday blasted New Jersey's former top federal prosecutor, Chris Christie, for choosing a firm headed by his one-time boss, John Ashcroft, to monitor a company accused of corporate crime.

Several lawmakers criticized Christie, the GOP nominee for governor this fall, for appearing to play favorites by picking the former U.S. attorney general for the job. Ashcroft's company earned between $27 million and $52 million under a no-bid federal contract to monitor a medical device manufacturer in Indiana implicated in a kickback scheme.

"$52 million is a lot of money," Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., said at Thursday's hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. "When the prosecutor makes a decision on who the monitor is, (and) it's their friend, then the public is going to say it's the good-ol'-boy network, and these are appearances we want to avoid."

 The New York Times has even more details:

In Testy Exchange in Congress, Christie Defends His Record as a Prosecutor

Christopher J. Christie, New Jersey’s former United States attorney, on Thursday aggressively defended his decision to award his political allies lucrative contracts to monitor corrupt corporations, telling a Congressional panel that his actions had upheld justice and saved taxpayers money.

In an appearance that was by turns triumphant and testy, Mr. Christie, New Jersey’s Republican nominee for governor, also brushed aside suggestions that the monitoring contract he gave John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, which was worth as much as $52 million, was an example of cronyism. Mr. Christie said that in addition to Mr. Ashcroft’s extensive legal experience, he is a native Missourian, and the company he was appointed to oversee had requested a monitor “with a Midwestern sensibility.”

All seven of the contracts Mr. Christie awarded during his seven years in office had a single goal, he asserted: “to achieve results of justice for the public.”

But under tense questioning, he acknowledged that one of the law firms that he had given a contract has since made substantial donations to his campaign for governor. He also found himself on the defensive over newly released e-mail messages indicating that he refused to intervene on behalf of a company that had objected to the high fees Mr. Ashcroft’s firm was charging, including $750,000 a month solely to pay Mr. Ashcroft and two other executives.

And Christie's emotional and angry defense sure doesn't help his case:

I think I might be in the wrong line of work.