Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed - even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News.
"It went on for months before the affair was public," said Lee Degenstein, 52, a retired Smith Barney vice president who formerly lived at 200 E. 94th St., Nathan's old building.
"It was going on longer than anybody thought," added Degenstein, who, along with others in the neighborhood, said they often saw Nathan hopping into unmarked NYPD cars in early 2000, before the affair was revealed that May.
When pressed by The News Thursday, aides to the Republican presidential hopeful conceded that Nathan got police protection "sporadically" before December 2000 - the previously acknowledged beginning of her taxpayer-funded detail.
The reason the Giuliani camp has given that Judi was under security detail was because of unspecified threats in 2000. The story includes allegations that she was getting escorted as early as 1999.
The slow trickle of revelations about the escapades of Judi 'n' Rudy have turned into a firehouse. Since New York's City Hall made public the financial records obtained by the Politico through a Freedom of Information Act request, the stories have come fast and furious. To wit:
• Mayoral aides were forced to go out of town to the Hamptons during Giuliani's love trysts, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for travel expenses.
• The Mayor's Office put $400,000 in expenses on a prepaid American Express card to cover expenses from Rudy's security detail. The bill was charged to an agency that's supposed to provide lawyers for poor defendants. This $400,000 fund was then used to pay for travel expenses incurred during many of Rudy's trips out to the Hamptons.
• Apparently, the security coverage given to Judith Nathan not only protected her, but ferried around friends and family, without Nathan, in NYPD cars. It's bad enough to expend security resources on a private citizen - Nathan was not the Mayor's wife at this time, and Giuliani was still married to Donna Hanover - but using the NYPD as a chauffeur in addition to their other crimefighting activities is beyond the pale.
The focus on the Shag Fund has crowded out other stories about Giuliani that broke this week, including his business ties to a Qatari sheikh who harbored Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But clearly, this episode reflects that anyone loyal to Giuliani lives under different rules than the rest of us. It's cronyism, it's patronage, it's preferential treatment. It's, as John Edwards has said, "Bush on steroids."
Today brings us a load of media stories about Rudy Giuliani's taxpayer-funded adultery. And Rudy's campaign clearly can't keep the story straight. They appear to have settled on the idea that the expenses were reimbursed by the NYPD and there's nothing to see here. Of course, this is a non-answer. Unless there's some wealthy benefactor named "NYPD," mayor's office and police department funds are all paid by taxpayers. It's irrelevant to the main issue: why did Rudy stash these expenses in obscure portions of the budget in the first place?
Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor in Giuliani's City Hall, told the Daily News Wednesday night that the administration's practice of allocating security expenses to small city offices that had nothing to do with mayoral protection has "gone on for years" and "predates Giuliani."
When told budget officials from the administrations of Ed Koch and David Dinkins said they did no such thing, Lhota caved Thursday, "I'm going to reverse myself on that. I'm just going to talk about the Giuliani era," Lhota said. "I should only talk about what I know about."
That's priceless.
As more and more gets unearthed, it looks like these Shag Fund expenses were only a part of Giuliani's living off the public dime.
It seems more likely in his final years and months as mayor Rudy was living larger and larger on the NYC dime. And a look at the book-keeping details that are emerging suggests a very conscious effort to use these squirrelly accounting techniques to hide Rudy's high-living ways from public scrutiny. Some of it was Shag Fund spending, but not all, probably not even most.
The problem is that even though the accounting techniques were part of a general effort to hide Rudy's living the high-life on the city's dime, it's now shined a bright light on the Shag Fund. And the Shag Fund was evidently spread more widely than the stuff accounted for with the squirrelly book-keeping.
Who paid for the city car and driver given to Judi while she was still Rudy's mistress?
Who paid for her security detail?
Why did she have one?
Does the city have to pay for travel and expenses for Rudy's wife and his mistress? Can't the budgeting be monogamous even if Rudy's not?
The NY Times has more on this element of the story. The attempts to conceal this from public view until well after his potential Senate run, and his stonewalling of investigations into these practices by auditors in 2001 and 2002, back up the accounts.
(City Comptroller William C. Thompson) said auditors working under his predecessor first raised questions about the travel costs during the Giuliani administration. Their requests to the Giuliani administration for details and justification went unanswered, Mr. Thompson said.
Indeed, while Mr. Giuliani and his aides provided extensive responses yesterday to the reports about the billing practices, they did not, according to the Politico report, offer any explanation before its publication.
Rudy Giuliani is trying to call the story about his taxpayer-funded adultery a hit job. In that case, the hits just keep on coming.
In 2001, the last year of Rudy's mayoralty, the city gave Judi her own taxpayer-funded security detail, too -- even as it reduced the size of the security detail assigned to Rudy's soon-to-be-ex.
From the New York Post on June 4, 2001:
"The Post has learned that city detectives have once again been assigned to protect Mayor Giuliani's girlfriend, even as he has scaled back the size of his estranged wife's police detail.
Nathan and her pooch were seen yesterday being escorted to her Upper East Side apartment by one of the detectives now assigned to watch over her during the day when she's not at the mayor's side."
Turns out that the NYPD were a taxi service for the Mayor's mistress. All of these costs protecting a private citizen, the overtime and travel expenses, were billed to New York City taxpayers. This is exactly the kind of behavior that took down New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who was using state employees "as chauffeurs and aides to his wife." So we not only have extremely unethical behavior, it could be criminal, though Josh Marshall thinks Rudy will skate because Hevesi was nailed on a state law, not a city statute.
It's still unclear how much money we're talking about here, because the expenses are so buried and misallocated:
The comptroller found that Giuliani's office hid $143,867 worth of "non-local travel" expenses in random city agencies in 2000; they upped the slippery accounting in 2001, charging $435,215 in 2001. Given the charges for the Hamptons travel noted in the Politico piece, only a fraction of this was for the eleven trips.
In other words, Giuliani's office had something like a widespread policy of misallocation of which the trysts were just a part -- something that they'd also done for certain salaries, according to today's New York Times:
"The administration of Mr. Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said in 2002, several months after taking office, that the Giuliani administration had kept the budget for the mayor’s office artificially low by paying more than $5 million in salaries through other city agencies. The agencies to which Mr. Giuliani billed the travel expenses were outside the mayor’s office."
The Times adds that the NYPD typically picked up the bill for the mayor's security detail. But a Bloomberg aide tells the New York Daily News that it is common for the security detail to bill the mayor's office and then for the NYPD to reimburse it. However, "the aide could not confirm it was past practice to shuffle costs among an alphabet soup of agencies." There lies the rub.
What we have is the slow uncovering of a history of recklessness and lawlessness while in the Mayor's office, where loyalty was valued and rules were disregarded. I think that'll be of note to the voters.
You can either defuse or intensify a scandal within the first 48 hours. For Rudy Giuliani, he's committing one of the cardinal sins - he's throwing the book at it, making multiple excuses, none of which pass the smell test.
Somehow CNN managed to shoehorn the question about his government-financed adultery into the YouTube debate, even though the questions were supposed to be all pre-taped. And he stumbled through it:
"First of all, it's not true," he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. "I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't.
"And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them," Giuliani said. "I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately."
That's a nutty answer. If it's not true, that should be the end of it. But he goes on to say that he had nothing to do with it, that the police put in their own records. If the whole thing is not true, how would he know what the police did? You can't claim it's false AND blame someone else. Furthermore, it makes no sense that the NYPD would hide his love trysts in the mayoral budget and not the police budget. That very act means that the mayor's office had to be involved at some level.
TRY THIS: "SECURITY." In 2001 and 2002, when city auditors questioned the expenses, the mayor's office refused to provide the documents, citing "security." [Politico.com, 11/28/07]
TRY THIS: "ACCOUNTING." Speaking with the Politico, which broke the story, "A Giuliani aide...denied that the unorthodox billing practices were aimed at hiding the expenses, citing 'accounting.'" [Politico.com, 11/28/07]
TRY THIS: "COMMON PRACTICE." Denying charges to the CBS Evening News, the Giuliani campaign said "this is common practice." [CBS Evening News, 11/28/07]
TRY THIS "HE DID EVERYTHING APPROPRIATE." Campaign surrogate Congressman Peter King told ABC: "The mayor did absolutely nothing improper, he did everything appropriate, the NYPD did everything appropriate. And even if you read the story carefully it does not say the mayor billed anyone for anything. But again, Mayor Giuliani and his staff, city hall will give a definitive answer. But I can assure you now that everything was done properly and there is absolutely nothing to it." ["Political Radar," ABCNews.com, 11/28/07]
TRY THIS: "LEGITIMATE EXPENSES," "FACT OF LIFE" The evening the story broke, top Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti told the Associated Press that "these were all legitimate expenses incurred in protecting the mayor, and his police detail covered him wherever he went, 24/7." He continued to say "You just do what you do and the police go with you. That's just a fact of life when you're the mayor of New York." [Associated Press, 11/28/07]
TRY THIS: WE'LL INVESTIGATE. Carbonetti then told reporters in the same time period "that he has ordered an investigation, and "he does not know why the charges were accounted for" in this way. He continued to say "I first learned the fact of this today," and while he had "heard about something like this a few days ago" he "was told it was being handled." ["The Trail," WashingtonPost.com, 11/28/07]
That's SIX explanations in one day. Actually, seven, because later in the AP story an aide came up with this beaut:
Later, an aide said that for accounting purposes, the expenses appear to have been temporarily allocated to city offices and paid for out of the mayor's budget but that the police department ultimately picked up the tab and reimbursed the mayor's office at the end of each year.
Huh? It's common practice in New York City for extra-budgetary payments hidden from taxpayers?
Probably should be mentioned that the guy in charge of security in this period was Bernie Kerik.
The truth is that the Giuliani camp has no idea how to deal with this one. There's no unity of message because there's no proper explanation for hiding exuberant expenses in the most audacious manner:
Admittedly he only charged $10,000 to the people with disabilities fund. Chump change for the shag fund. But the office charged with getting counsel for indigent defendants got stuck with $400,000.
Rudy and Judy aren't like us little people. But even that high in the stratosphere, half a million dollars covers a lot of shagging.
I'd heard a lot that Rudy'd done a lot to screw poor folks caught up in the criminal justice system but this puts the matter in a whole new light.
So far this story isn't getting major attention, but I can't see that continuing, although admittedly I don't know what it takes for the traditional media to notice things at this point.
This could end up being a big deal, because nothing gets the media going more than hypocrisy and sex.
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
Yes, it would be hard to justify expenses incurred out in the Hamptons, which is kind of, you know, not in New York City.
Isn't Giuliani the guy who goes on and on about how government-financed health care is like socialism? What does that make government-financed adultery?
Also, Rudy isn't exactly poor. He couldn't spring for a city hotel room to have his trysts with Judi Nathan, instead of putting it on the public dime and forcing the security detail to tag along? or he couldn't use the Ground Zero-area love nest like Bernie Kerik? I think this is more about somebody abusing the system because they could, and hiding it from public view because that's the way things are done.
The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.
When the city's fiscal monitor asked for an explanation, Giuliani's aides refused, citing "security," said Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for the city comptroller.
But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.
The official secrecy, the abuse of the public trust - sound like somebody currently in the Oval Office that you know?
Interesting to note this too:
Receipts show him in Southampton every weekend in August and the first weekend in September of 2001, before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 disrupted the routines of his city.
9/11 really did change everything. Even Rudy's booty call schedule.
My favorite part of the very detailed article, though, is this:
None of the 2001 trips to Southampton appear in Giuliani's official schedule. However, the schedule does contain a potential clue to his destination. Before three of them, Giuliani paid a visit to his barber, Carlo Fargnoli, on York Avenue near the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion.
Judi must have been a stickler for proper appearance. Seriously, a barber before every date? And considering we're talking about Giuliani, for WHAT?
This is less a story about the awkward, bungling efforts to charge the public for his own affairs, so much as what it reveals about Rudy himself, his arrogance, his lack of accountability, his unfamiliarity with ethics.
“I Perform The Same Lame, Fake Campaign Stunt At Every Speech Because of 9/11.”
Conservative John Fund of the WSJ reveals that Rudy Giuliani's taking the phone call from Judy bit is an old standby.
Even members of Mr. Giuliani's own staff are appalled at how he handled the incident in which he answered a phone call from his wife, Judith, right in the middle of a nationally televised speech to the National Rifle Association.
What was that about? Columnist Robert Novak cites "supporters from outside the Giuliani staff" who claim that taking phone calls from his wife as been "part of his political bag of tricks all year." But Mr. Giuliani's deputy press secretary Jason Miller told me the NRA incident was definitely not a stunt. Instead it was a "candid and spontaneous moment" that would humanize the tough-guy former mayor with voters.
Nice try. Just in case this isn't obviously ridiculous, Fox News commissioned a poll on the subject. It found that only 9% of Americans think a candidate should ever interrupt a speech to accept a call from his spouse.
The fact is that people inside the Giuliani campaign are appalled at the number of times their candidate has felt compelled to interrupt public appearances to take calls from his wife. The estimate from those in a position to know is that he has taken such calls more than 40 times in the middle of speeches, conferences and presentations to large donors. "If it's a stunt, it's not one coming from him," says one Giuliani staffer. "It's an ongoing problem that he won't take advice on."
That last part from the staffer I disagree with. It's clearly a stunt. Rudy thinks it humanizes him to play cute with the wife in the middle of the speeches. Either that, or if Judy gets voice mail, the pet rabbit gets boiled.
Of course, the absolutely crazy part is when, asked why in God's name he would take a phone call in the middle of a nationally televised speech, Rudy succumbed to his long struggle with 9-11 Tourettes again. Here's the quote:
Giuliani also addressed a cell phone call he took from his wife, Judith, last week during his speech to the National Rifle Association...
"And quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other," he said.
I think we all have to prepare ourselves for the reality that Rudolph Giuliani has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Anyone who has to call their loved ones before getting on a plane SIX YEARS after the fact is probably also waking up in the middle of the night with the sweats, getting the thousand-yard stare, seeing scenes from The Deer Hunter in his dreams, etc. This is irrational behavior.
The 22-second interruption wasn't the first time Judith Giuliani has dialed her husband in mid-speech. It happened in June as Giuliani addressed a Hispanic rally in Florida.
Giuliani's third wife has lowered her profile in recent months after unflattering media attention about her two previous marriages and an allegedly extravagant lifestyle. The candidate has stoutly defended his wife and said as President he'd be comfortable having her attend cabinet meetings - but later downplayed any policy role she would play.
And interestingly enough, the one thing the campaign responded to in every news story was whether or not the call was genuine.
The Republican candidates can't rouse themselves to attend debates sponsored by Univision or hosted by Tavis Smiley and PBS, but of course they will madly scramble to any event organized by the three million member NRA.
Giuliani spoke at the NRA convention yesterday - a dicey proposition due to his prior words. In the following clip from Charlie Rose, Rudy! says "the NRA is involved in a strategy that I don't understand":
He goes on to call the NRA "extremists" who unwisely employ the slippery slope argument.
Then there's the federal lawsuit Rudy! filed against gun manufacturers while mayor. Here, Rudy! dances as fast as he can, tap-tap-tapping away from his affront to the gun lobby's sensibilities (which d-day also references below):
Yesterday, Giuliani backed away from the lawsuit, saying he might not uphold it if he were a judge.
"That lawsuit has taken several turns and several twists that I don't agree with," he said, without going into specifics. "I also think that there are some major intervening events -- September 11, which cast somewhat of a different light on the Second Amendment, doesn't change it fundamentally but perhaps highlights the necessity of it."
This quote and Cook's Tour courtesy of Steve Benen from TPM. But I must part ways with Steve's assessment:
By any reasonable measure, this is a fairly silly thing to say. Giuliani couldn't even chalk it up to flubbing a question, since he was reading from a prepared text.* In other words, he meant to say that 9/11 helped change his mind on gun control.
Asked to explain the shift, a campaign spokesperson said Giuliani was "making a point that personal rights such as the 2nd Amendment are even more critical in a post-September 11th world."
It's hard to believe a serious presidential campaign could offer such a foolish rationale for obvious nonsense, and yet, here we are.
Would that large swaths of the American electorate might view this rationale for Rudy's about-face as "nonsense." I'd be happy to be proved wrong, of course. But I can't imagine Rs or swing voters seeing anything wrong with Rudy's answer whatsoever. It's just the type of rationale the Republican party has been offering for six years now, a sort of collective alibi for politicians and Americans who both went screaming yellow bonkers after 9/11.
Candidates and strategists would be well-advised to remember that victims of cons will do anything to admit it to themselves. Don't count on people who readily identified with a hastily invented faux demographic cluster such as Security Moms to mock those who continue to solemnly intone that 9/11 Changed Everything. Such words are talismans against any feelings of foolishness or shame that vast numbers of people allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by The Big Con.
So how did Rudy! do at the NRA?
For the most part, Rudy! seemed to ruffle few feathers. About the best outcome he could have imagined, really, given his challenges with this audience.
But the oddest moment was when he took a moment while on stage to answer a call from his wife.
As the NYT's Caucus reports, Rudy! answered his cell phone while addressing the assembled gun advocates:
“Hello dear. I’m talking to the members of the N.R.A. right now. Would you like to say hello?” he said, apparently speaking to his wife, Judith. “I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished. Have a safe trip. Bye bye.”
Though there was some scattered laughter, the audience was mostly quiet as Mr. Giuliani ended the call and added: “This is one of the great blessings of the modern age – to always be available.”
This is not the first time Rudy!'s answered a call from his wife while onstage.
I haven't yet found video of this, so I can only imagine this odd moment. Rudy, speaking before a gathering of the noisiest troops of the phallic insecurity brigade, pauses to take a "Hi honey" call from his wife.
It's fascinating to see two candidates running breathlessly toward the Alpha Male prize (awarded to the Republican nominee, regardless of merit, upon nomination) who have such uncharacteristic relationships with their wives.
First we had Grandpa Freddie's controlling trophy wife chasing away one consultant after another.
Now we have Rudy making goo-goo eyes at his third wife - she of the permanently manic, Jennifer Wilbanks-like expression - while speaking to the gun lobby. What does he think this looks like? He may think it's a charming profession by a man unafraid to tell his wife he loves her in front of a bunch of hunters. Let's hope he's that clueless. Because what it really looks like is a man who has no idea how weird his relationship with his current wife looks.
Does he think this public declaration of love business will score points with women? If so, an even bigger mistake: since Judi is the prototypical marriage-wrecking Other Woman that women love to hate, this is unlikely to work with women. Rudy! sounds like just another creepy guy trying to convince his kids of their new stepmom's charms. All he ends up saying is how much he likes her. Since we can't quite see why we should like her but are repeatedly forced to consider her, our thoughts naturally roam to speculation abut why Rudy! likes her so much. And the less we dwell in that realm, the better. For all of us.
I'm waiting for the ad with Rudy holding his wife's purse.
I think this latest comment from Rudy Giuliani, where he showed his true narcissistic colors and equated his photo-ops at Ground Zero to being a rescue worker, is really going to hurt him. This would have been a bad weekend anyway, with Mitt Romney sucking up all the good press from the Straw Poll he bought. But now, Rudy's 9/11 bona fides are getting some scrutiny. And while this devastating article in the Village Voice won't get national press attention, enough people have seen it to give them a blueprint of Rudy's vulnerabilities on his self-created mythology.
The story, by Giuliani biographer Wayne Barrett, details five big lies that Giuliani has been spreading on the campaign trail about his response to September 11. As John Kerry leaned on his Vietnam experience to provide a campaign narrative in 2004, so too is Giuliani leaning on his 9/11 story; it's told on practically every stop on the stump. There is no real policy apparatus to the Giuliani campaign, so his entire argument for being President seems to be "I protected you on 9/11, Democrats are bad, vote for me." But this theme is littered with inconsistencies and outright lies. Here's just one example.
1. 'I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.' This pillar of the Giuliani campaign—asserted by pundits as often as it is by the man himself—is based on the idea that Rudy uniquely understands the terror threat because of his background as a prosecutor and as New York's mayor. In a July appearance at a Maryland synagogue, Giuliani sketched out his counterterrorism biography, a resume that happens to be rooted in falsehood.
"As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. "It's honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat," says Giuliani. "I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases."
On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani's office "was involved at all." Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he "never had any contact" with Giuliani or his office.
That's just a small example. Giuliani blew the only terrorism case he ever prosecuted (most of the charges were thrown out); he never really discussed terrorism in the 8 years leading up to 9/11; he waited 6 years to even create an Office of Emergency Management; he put the HQ in the World Trade Center complex instead of a secure site in Brooklyn, even though the WTC was hit in 1993 (mainly so he could walk to it easily); he didn't change the non-functional radio systems that caused hundreds of firefighters to never hear the evacuation order, or make them inter-operable with the police radios; he assured rescue workers that the air was safe at Ground Zero for cleanup; he hid the results of his own Administration's field studies showing dangerous levels of toxicity; and then there's this:
The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator.
The emergency management center was a freakin' love nest!
The harm here is that this is the ultimate oppo research document, a story from which a thousand TV ads can be culled. And they have the added benefit of being true. Rudy has scrupulously created a hagiographic reading of his role on 9/11 through the years that simply doesn't match the facts. And this slip-up this week is the crack that was needed to call his entire story into question.
I'm openly hoping that the little authoritarians on the right buy Rudy Giuliani's tough guy shtick and pick him to lead the party because he'll "kick some terrorist ass." Because if this guy ever gets to a general election, the chorus of opposition from those who knew and worked with him will make the Swift Boat campaign look like a tea party.
Today in the New York Times, Jerome Hauer, a former member of Rudy's "inner circle" and the former emergency management director for New York City, slams Giuliani for his various distortions and poor judgment in protecting the city. Talk about attacking the opponent's strength, I think we have too much information to fit in one book here.
In recent days, Mr. Hauer has challenged Mr. Giuliani’s recollection that he had little role as mayor in placing the city’s emergency command center at the ill-fated World Trade Center.
Mr. Hauer has also disputed the claim by the Giuliani campaign that the mayor’s wife, Judith Giuliani, had coordinated a help center for families after the attack.
And he has contradicted Mr. Giuliani’s assertions that the city’s emergency response was well coordinated that day, a point he made most notably to the authors of “Grand Illusion,” a book that depicts Mr. Giuliani’s antiterrorism efforts as deeply flawed.
"Grand Illusion" is a good name for it. Apparently the fallout between Giuliani and Hauer came when Hauer endorsed Mark Green for Mayor over Michael Bloomberg. Rudy went nuts, saying "If you do this, you’re done ... I’m going to end your career." The similarity in terms of valuing loyalty between Giuliani and Bush is apparent (Bush said something very similar to Al Hunt when Hunt touted Jack Kemp over his father for President in 1988).
Hauer describes how Giuliani drove the debate over where to house the emergency management control center shortly after he signed on as emergency management director in 1996.
One of Mr. Hauer’s first tasks was to find a home for an emergency command center to replace the inadequate facilities at police headquarters. Mr. Hauer suggested an office complex in downtown Brooklyn as a “good alternative” in a memorandum.
But Mr. Hauer said the mayor insisted instead on a site within walking distance of City Hall. Given that concern and others, Mr. Hauer said he decided that offices on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, next to the twin towers and just a few blocks from City Hall, seemed the best choice.
The site was immediately controversial because it was part of the trade center, which had already been the location of a truck bomb attack in 1993. City officials, though, including Mr. Hauer, have long defended their decision, even after the command center had to be evacuated during the 2001 terror attack.
Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Mr. Giuliani again faced questions about the site. He put responsibility for selecting it on Mr. Hauer.
“Jerry Hauer recommended that as the prime site and the site that would make the most sense,” Mr. Giuliani said. “It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected.”
Mr. Hauer took immediate exception to that account in interviews. “That’s Rudy’s own reality that he lives in,” he said. “It is not, in fact, the truth.”
Again, how typical, and how redolent of what we've lived with over the last six years. Blame somebody else for your own mistakes, attack your critics, find scapegoats. Incidentally, why in Jebus' name should the walking distance from City Hall play a role in where to house an emergency command center, especially when that forces the final site to be in a complex that has been targeted by terrorists in the past?
Giuliani has also lied about the role of his wife, who is caught up in his own hagiography:
Mr. Hauer left his city job in 2000. A year later, Mr. Giuliani called him back into service after the terror attacks. He was assigned to help prepare for possible biological or chemical attacks and to help set up an assistance center for victims’ families.
Mr. Giuliani’s wife, Judith, who was then his companion, also had a role in setting up the center. But last week Mr. Hauer told New York magazine that the campaign’s depiction of her role was “simply a lie.”
The campaign’s Web site said that Mrs. Giuliani had “coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.”
Indeed, others were at least equally involved in that effort. Rosemary O’Keefe, who was then director of the Community Assistance Unit, said Mrs. Giuliani had helped during the first two days at the pier.
The campaign has since taken down the language on the Web because they know it's wrong.
The image of Rudy Giuliani is gradually becoming tarnished by these continued revelations. The media is finally taking off the halo and taking a more sober and realistic look at the former Mayor's decisions, and their consequences:
As more and more workers who inhaled the dust at ground zero fall ill, it has become increasingly clear that much of the problem can be traced to the Giuliani administration’s failure to insist that all emergency personnel and construction workers at the site wear respirators.
The then-mayor and his agency heads put their emphasis on a speedy cleanup and return to normalcy. In that, they were remarkably successful, clearing the site in less than 10 months. Unfortunately, the price is now being paid by thousands of workers who have developed lung and other ailments.
Again, I can't help but note the similarities to the current Administration. Appearance is always favored to reality. It was more important that everybody "return to normal" and that the area is swept clean and made to look nice instead of ensuring worker safety. It's the President and his emergency generators in Jackson Square all over again.
I hope the Ron Paul exchange carries Rudy all the way to the nomination. The fact that he's considering skipping Iowa doesn't make me hopeful. But I'd love the opportunity to beat Giuliani in 2008. The evidence is overwhelming.
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