Former Port Authority exec Bill Baroni got a clear path to the slammer on Tuesday when a judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison for his role in the traffic-snarling “Bridgegate” scandal that wrecked Chris Christie’s bid for the White House.
The punishment was announced on Twitter by the New Jersey US Attorney’s Office.
The sentence is six months less than the two years that Baroni got before an appeals court last year tossed two of the nine counts on which he and co-conspirator Bridget Anne Kelly were convicted in 2016.
Kelly, who was deputy chief of staff to then-Gov. Chris Christie, is appealing further to the US Supreme Court.
But Baroni — whom Christie named the No. 2 official at the Port Authority — decided to throw in the towel following the unanimous ruling from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
During Tuesday’s court proceeding in Newark, Baroni said he was “so sorry” for his crimes and blamed his blind loyalty to Christie for clouding his judgment.
“I wanted to be on the team, I wanted to please him, but I chose to get sucked into his cult and culture,” Baroni said.
“So by the time of this idea, to use the lanes of the George Washington Bridge to help his campaign, I no longer had that line of right and wrong to say no or to stop it. So I didn’t.”
Federal Judge Susan Wigenton said that despite the appeals court ruling in Baroni’s favor — which reduced the amount of time he faced under sentencing guidelines — the facts in his case “haven’t changed.”
“It’s easy for everyone to distance themselves from what happened in 2013 and to feel as if it’s water under the bridge — excuse the pun — and we all just move on from there,” she said.
“The reality is…that this was really an outrageous display of power, and it was done because he could do it.”
Wigenton did not set a date for Baroni, 47, to begin serving his sentence, which will be set by the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Outside court, Baroni said: “Now I will move on to the next chapter and continue to serve my community as I have done.”
Baroni and Kelly were found guilty of plotting with another PA exec, David Wildstein, to repeatedly close approach lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September 2013, backing up traffic in nearby Fort Lee.
The scheme was intended as political revenge against Democratic Fort Lee Mayor Marc Sokolich for refusing to endorse Christie’s re-election that year.
Christie, a Republican, won a landslide victory but saw his 2016 presidential hopes crash and burn as evidence in the case emerged, including an infamous email in which Kelly wrote: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
The scheme was the brainchild of Wildstein, another Christie appointee who pleaded guilty as part of a deal in which he testified against Baroni and Kelly.
In his recently published memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Christie wrote that he “misevaluated” Baroni, who was a Republican New Jersey state senator when Christie named him deputy executive director of the PA.
“I don’t believe he came up with this plot. He is too smart for that. I think he was not strong enough to say ‘no’ to his best friend, lying felon David Wildstein,” Christie wrote.
“It was Bill’s inability to do that one, simple thing — to say no to David Wildstein — that may ultimately cost him his freedom. And it was my failure to see that in him that may have cost me the presidency of the United States.”
After failing to make the cut during the 2016 GOP primaries, Christie endorsed President Trump’s candidacy but was later fired as the head of the transition team and twice passed over for the job of US attorney general.
Last year, he turned down the possibility of becoming Trump’s third chief of staff, following the ouster of John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general.