The case I find damning is Christie's prosecution of Hemant Lakhani. This American Life did a full hour on that case 4 years ago and ran an updated version last week. . It includes a lot of sound-bites from Christie being remarkably honest, and at points I was expecting to hear him apologize, but no. He instead ultimately makes the argument that 9-11 has done a great thing for law enforcement, because they now feel safe engaging in entrapment of "bad people."

In Lakhani's case, the government took a tip from an informant who they had dismissed as unreliable, provided all of the resources for a completely bogus illegal arms sale, and managed to convict someone who ultimately had none of the knowledge, capital, contacts, or motivation he would have needed to actually take part in such a crime in the real world. Christie is very direct in making a hyper-Calvinist argument that there are "good people" and there are "bad people," and that punishing "bad people" for that status is an end in itself. He was quite pleased with himself for convicting someone who didn't pose a threat of any sort, simply by creating an opportunity for Lakhani to make a very wrong decision.

I hope that someone in NJ has the guts to take on Christie directly on that philosophy of law enforcement. It is certainly wrong for a prosecutor to put a political spin into his public statements as Marra seems to have done, but that is trivial compared to Christie's clearly stated rationale for aggressive entrapment.