Rudy responds to billing issue
Rudy Giuliani tonight denied that he made any effort to hide security costs that might have resulted from visits he made, while mayor of New York, to the woman who became his third wife.
Asked during the CNN/YouTube debate about the Politico story that generated a flurry of attention shortly before the forum started, Giuliani said flatly it was "not true" that he directed any effort to bill obscure city agencies for security costs, such as police staying in nearby hotels.
Giuliani went on to note that as mayor, he had round-the-clock protection. And he said he needed it, referring to threats he faced (as have been recently written about).
He then clearly indicated how he, at least for now, would deflect continuing inquires about how mayoral security costs apparently showed up in the debit columns of offices that had nothing to do with those functions -- if it happened, someone else did it.
His security forces, he said, "took care of me, and they put it in their records, and they handled them (the accounting of the expenses) in the way they handled them. I had nothing to do with the handling of their records. And they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately." A debate transcript is available here.
Debate moderator Anderson Cooper let it go at that. But we doubt that will be the end of the matter.
-- Don Frederick
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Of course he denied it, but that don't make it untrue.
Posted by: MickeyinATL | November 28, 2007 at 07:58 PM
Could you source that to somewhere other than FOX news? They may have "written about it", but covering it accurately is another concept entirely, one I am uncertain FOX news takes seriously.
Posted by: a | November 28, 2007 at 08:04 PM