Republicans or Independents dreaming of a 2016 presidential candidacy by the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, would be well advised first to have a look at libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column. It's about J.P. Morgan Chase, but it gets into some past Christie adventures with deferred prosecution agreements (DPA):
Don't expect, however, that this precedent will slow down Bharara and the OCC. For comfort, they need only to look at the sordid 2006 DPA agreement that then-New Jersey District Attorney Chris Christie extracted from Bristol-Myers Squibb in a securities case, which I denounced at the time as "The Deferred Prosecution Racket." Christie used his leverage to gain a seat in the BMS Board Room and reserved the right to haul BMS on the carpet for an informal mini-trial in his office to decide whether the company had violated the terms of its DPA. To top it all off, he also required BMS to make a special gift (a practice since banned) to his alma mater, Seton Hall Law School, to support its ethics program.