Today New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (who, just returned from two weeks of vacation, is off to Iowa to speak about the past year in New Jersey education and at a fundraiser for GOP Rep. Steve King) has been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union over his administration’s refusal to release any correspondence between Fox News President Roger Ailes and the governor and his staff.

On May 25, Cook, a reporter for Gawker Entertainment LLC., had requested that any correspondence, phone records and calendar entries regarding a meeting between Christie and Ailes at the Fox News chief’s New York home during the summer of 2010 be released. As the Star-Ledger reports, Cook had requested to see the correspondence under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA) after New York magazine reported on the meeting at which Ailes was said to urge Christie to run for president.

Christie’s office has invoked “executive privilege.” Cook counters that the governor’s claim of executive privilege shows that he “appears to be treating the media executive as an adviser.”

The ACLU offered pro bono legal advice after Cook’s request was rejected. The lawsuit was filed in Superior Court in Mercer County in central Jersey, where the state capital of Trenton (and the governor’s Princeton Drumthwacket mansion) are located. The lawsuit asserts that the “state’s blanket assertion of executive privilege, without explanation or description of the documents, was insufficient to sustain the executive privilege claim.”

Said Cook on PolitickerNJ:

“The public has a right to know whether the head of America’s most-watched cable news channel is advising a sitting governor on State matters. If the emails on the state system between the Governor and Ailes don’t relate to Christie’s functions as Governor, then they can’t be hidden from the public.”

In a more general comment about politicians and the press, Cook also said in the Star-Ledger:

“It’s important for consumers of media and voters to understand the extent to which Fox News, which is one of the most powerful and important news networks, is a hybrid news and political operation.”

Cook’s a comment resonates all the more in light of the close ties between politicians and the British media that have been emerging in regard to the now-defunct News of the World. Both the British tabloid and Fox News are part of  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation media empire. In light of the phone hacking scandal and the ongoing investigation about it in the UK — not to mention an FBI inquiry into allegations that the phones of 9/11 victims were hacked and the calls by New Jersey senators for a Department of Justice investigation into News Corp. — Christie saying that any information about his meeting with Ailes is not for public viewing suggests, well, it suggests he’d rather we not know about it.

I expect, once he’s back in the state, Christie will offer his trademark bombast to put us all into our places for asking him about whatever he and Ailes discussed. We’ll be told it’s “none of our beeswax” to know what our governor was doing in some air-cooled Manhattan high-rise in August of 2010, instead of cooling his heels at the Jersey shore as does average Joe Jersey (the constituency Christie claimed he was representing when he was elected). One would think that Christie and Ailes were not just discussing how to deal with the pesky public school teachers’ union in that other state across the Hudson.

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