The Giuliani Papers

Giuliani Expert Wayne Barrett Interview

Giuliani nemesis Wayne Barrett gives a detailed interview to Democracy Now full of new information on Kerik, Regan, Fox, Robertson and Rudy. It is a must-read.

For instance, on Kerik and Judith Regan:

I think many of the counts in the Kerik indictment come from information that was originally available to Judith Regan. There’s one count in particular: in addition to publishing his book, Kerik’s book, Lost Son, she also published a book that was a book of photos of 9/11, and Kerik wrote the foreword for that and was paid $75,000 by ReganBooks. He was supposed to contribute that to the children and -- to the Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund, Fire and Police, and instead he deposited it in an account that no one knew about, a corporation no one knew about. She certainly had to know about it, because that’s where the deposits were made. And that corporation winds up getting not only this $75,000, but a half-million dollars that represents many of the counts in the tax case, because he didn’t pay taxes on any of this half-million dollars in income, this separate corporation, which I think Regan really opened the door to, in terms of where all this money was going.

On Rudy, Kerik and the Homeland Security nomination:

And, you know, it’s one thing to make a mistake, as the mayor likes to put it -- “Oh, I made a lot of decisions; this one was a mistake” -- but the entire core of his presidential campaign, the rationale for it, is “I’m the best man to defend America.” Well, he had one opportunity to prove that, unless you consider being down at Ground Zero an opportunity to prove that he’s the man to defend America, but he had one opportunity to prove it, which was he got to select -- the President of the United States was all ears to Rudy -- he got to select the next Homeland Security secretary, and he came up with a bum.

On Giuliani's private testimony to the 9/11 Commission:

I got a copy of the private testimony that Giuliani gave on April 20, 2004. Now, this private testimony is not supposed to be released until, coincidentally, December 2008. Someone internally on the staff made the decision that not just Giuliani’s testimony, but that all the testimony for Chapter 9, which is the testimony that relates to the city’s response, would not be made public until December 2008.

This testimony clearly reveals that everything that Giuliani is saying about his expertise -- he now calls himself an “expert” on terrorism, who’s been studying it for thirty-five years. And he claims things like when he went to Pat Robertson’s university, Regent University, he said, “bin Laden declared war on America, but nobody heard him. But I heard him. I understood what he was saying.” Well, in the testimony, Rudy says the opposite. He says that the first time he ever had a briefing on al-Qaeda was after 9/11.

Did Giuliani "Edit" His Mayoral Archives?

Better late than never, I guess.

The Giuliani Papers posted this on June 26, 2007 here.

Now The Chicago Tribune gets around to it:

Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.

Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.

That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as "America's mayor," serves as the foundation of Giuliani's presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.

When Giuliani Tried to Cancel Elections

Before the smoke began to clear over New York after September 11, 2001, Rudolph Giuliani devised a plan that would halt impending mayoral elections and keep him in power beyond the term-limited end of his second and final four years as mayor.

The contemporary account of Giuliani's power grab written by Wayne Barrett of the Village voice is here.

To accomplish this coup Giuliani would have to persuade the New York candidates for mayor to postpone their ambitions and agree to appoint Rudy Dictator of New York.

On the Republican side, Michael Bloomberg didn't mind waiting a couple months. He was Giuliani's endorsed successor and basically the only Republican running.

It was the Democrats, of course, that Rudy needed on this one. The two major Democratic candidates were Mark Green, the city's public advocate, and Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president. Their primary had been scheduled for 9/11 and then rescheduled to October. Green ended up winning the nomination and then losing to Bloomberg. (Green has since bought the progressive radio network Air America.)

The Essential Giuliani

Rachel Morris in Washington Monthly presents a must-read, concisely rendered overview of why Rudolph Giuliani is the most dangerous potential holder of the office of president of the United States.

Many Giuliani watchers already understand that Rudy is a hothead and a grandstander, even a bit of a dictator at times. These qualities have dominated the story of his mayoralty that most people know. As that drama was unfolding, however, so was a quieter story, driven by Giuliani's instinct and capacity for manipulating the levers of government. His methods, like those of the current White House, included appointments of yes-men, aggressive tests of legal limits, strategic lawbreaking, resistance to oversight, and obsessive secrecy. As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don't apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances. That's why, of all the presidential candidates, Giuliani is most likely to take the expansions of the executive branch made by the Bush administration and push them further still. The blueprint can be found in the often-overlooked corners of his mayoralty.

Giuliani will make the Bush regime's grab for unconstitutional power look mild:

What is most disturbing is the likelihood that a Giuliani administration would venture beyond the expansive claims of executive authority staked out by the Bush White House. For instance, though Bush has demanded that Congress fund the war in Iraq, he has never openly questioned Congress's power of the purse. Giuliani, however, told a reporter that the president has the right to provide money for the troops to stay in Iraq even if Congress withdraws funding. Similarly, Bush has implied that critics of his Iraq policy are unpatriotic, but he has not declared that the government can silence their voices. This September, echoing the sentiments that he repeatedly attempted to enforce as mayor, Giuliani said that the "General Betray Us" ad paid for by the left-wing group MoveOn "passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass."

Read the entire piece. It is essential to understand Rudy.

NYC Police Union President: "Giuliani doesn't deserve to be president"

Pat Lynch, President of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, in an interview says:

"Rudy couldn't even manage his own police department. He hurt the NYPD."

See the video here.

Why Giuliani's Real Record in New York Matters So Much Right Now

For G. W. Bush in 2000 there was plenty of evidence from his years as governor and his years in business and his years as a spoiled rich kid with which to form judgements on the kind of president he would be.

Not enough of that evidence was considered by not enough people. Of course, not enough "news" purveyors reported that evidence and not enough opposition candidates stressed that evidence.

That was then. (And that was 2004, don't forget. Learning disabled, us Americans.)

This is now.

But it's not looking any better. Mainstream media is ignoring the reality of Giuliani just as it ignored the reality of Bush. And for that reason it is very possible that Giuliani and the Republican regime might very well win (or steal) the 2008 election.

There is more evidence about the sort of man Giuliani is and the sort of government he likes to run than there was about Bush. And that evidence makes clear that Giuliani's nature, the way he looks at the world, the way he reacts and responds to events, is a dangerous nature for a president.

In the first weeks of 1999, when Giuliani was in the middle of his second and final term as mayor, John Leonard foresaw that Rudy was planning to take his show on the road. Though, before the gift of 9/11, Giuliani was headed, at most, for VP. Leonard wrote in Salon:

The last five years in New York have been less about government than they've been about obedience training. Rudy's a guy with a built-in balcony, from which he barks our marching orders. Lawful assembly, and such free-speechifying as may attend its occasion, are particularly sore points around here.

Meanwhile, our Rudy, who began by threatening to abolish the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Civil Rights Division, to sell off public hospitals and East River bridges, to cancel the city's contract with Legal Aid; who'd subsequently propose uniforms for teachers, a casino on Governor's Island, a $15 million bomb-proof bunker for himself in the World Trade Center and turning the homeless out of city shelters after 90 days (which proved to be illegal); who has dumped every police commissioner, superintendent of schools and any other vassal who got more ink or air time than their feudal liege; who has belittled his predecessors and ridiculed his own task force on police brutality and won't even talk to the black community ("They're going to have to learn to discipline themselves in the way they speak"); who has declared Holy War on squeegee men ("drug-addicted psychopaths"), licensed street vendors (350 banned during daylight hours from Midtown and the Financial District), bicycle messengers and delivery boys (mostly immigrants), hookers and sex clubs, underage drinkers, aggressive panhandlers, Fourth of July Mafia fireworks, Chinese New Year's celebrations, salsa music on Amsterdam Avenue and boom boxes everywhere -- meanwhile, this Rudy has been busy on a dozen other Draconian fronts:

For more of this delicious outrage, it's here.

Rudy's Record of Ilegal Vengeance

Giuliani left an expensive legal mess for Bloomberg to clean up. The city of New York has had to pay millions of dollars to settle dozens of lawsuits that are the result of Mayor Giuliani's instinct for vengeance running up against the laws of the state of New York and the constitution of the United States.

(You'd kinda think a former associate U.S. Attorney General and former U.S. Attorney would know better. And if you think that Rudy the current candidate for president knows better, you're crazy.)

Jim Dwyer in The New York Times reported:

In the three years since Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Mr. Giuliani, the city has spent close to $2 million to settle lawsuits brought by residents and city workers who accused the Giuliani administration of retaliating against them for exercising free speech or other constitutional rights.

Among them is a limousine driver, James Schillaci, who had complained in a newspaper article about a red-light sting set up by the police in the Bronx. The same day, police came to his home to arrest him for a 13-year-old unpaid ticket. The next day, the mayor obtained - illegally, Mr. Schillaci said - the record of his arrests from decades earlier and discussed it, inaccurately, at a news conference. The city settled with him for $290,000 in 2002.

A correction worker charged that he was bypassed for promotion because he supported a political opponent of Mr. Giuliani's and that city investigators videotaped the guests arriving at his home for a political fund-raiser. The city paid him $325,000 this year.

Lawyers for the city say they agreed to pay as a way of making the best deal for the public, not because of wrongdoing by Mr. Giuliani or other officials.

The totals for such claims could grow. Dantae Johnson of the Bronx has charged in a lawsuit that after he was shot by a police officer in May 1999, Mr. Giuliani and the police commissioner, Howard Safir, falsely described him as a criminal to justify the shooting. The officer was convicted of assault. The city has denied responsibility.

Eric H. DeVarin III, an assistant deputy warden in the Correction Department, has claimed in a lawsuit that he was denied promotion because of a dispute with Mr. Kerik's former girlfriend. Mr. Kerik has said that is untrue.

The coming issue of the journal CityLaw reports that a federal magistrate has said that an AIDS housing group can proceed with a suit to recover $35 million in government contracts that it claims to have lost as punishment for protests against Mr. Giuliani's policies. The city lawyers say the Giuliani administration had many sound reasons to stop doing business with the group, called Housing Works

.

The Housing Works case was resolved six months later when the city agreed to pay Housing Works $4.8 million to avoid going to trial. The city continues to argue that under Giuliani's rule it did nothing wrong, but the city also continues to settle out of court.