Governor and blanched potato Chris Christie is a fixture at NFL games, often getting access to luxury boxes because of his relationships with people like Jerry Jones. Thanks to a report from Watchdog.org, we now have a pretty good idea of what Christie is doing while enjoying games from those luxury boxes: spending insane amounts of taxpayer dollars on food and drinks.
According to Watchdog, Christie used his office expense account to spend thousands and thousands of dollars at Jets and Giants games during the 2010 and 2011 seasons. From the report:
Christie’s most notable spending spree occurred during the 2010 and 2011 NFL football seasons at MetLife Stadium, where the New York’s Giants and Jets play their home games. New Jersey’s governor traditionally enjoys free use of luxury boxes for games and other events at the government-owned venue, but food and beverages cost extra.
On 58 occasions, Christie used a debit card to pay a total of $82,594 to Delaware North Sportservice, which operates the concessions at MetLife. The governor’s office did not provide any receipts, business reasons or names of individuals entertained, but defended the expense.
That’s an incredible amount of money to spend on concessions over two seasons of home games. Even if you allow the possibility that Christie attended every single Giants and Jets home game over those two seasons, he still spent $2,581 per game. On food and drinks! And there were 58 total charges, so it’s not like he was just plunking down money for a spread of food on a game-to-game basis. What the hell was this man buying, a fresh round of caviar and champagne every quarter? Bath tub full of nachos and gold? The company that handles concessions at MetLife also sells merchandise, so maybe Christie was buying throwback jerseys for his pals every game.
Nah, it was probably the nachos.