Did Trump Have Anyone Around Him Who Wasn't a Crook?
Poor Rudy Giuliani. Twenty years ago, he was ‘America’s Mayor.’ Twenty years ago, he was given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Twenty years ago, he was commanding top dollar for appearances on the charity dinner circuit. Twenty years ago, this son of a low-level Mafia enforcer was someone whose political ambitions reached to the New York State Governor’s mansion and beyond.
That was then, this is now. And now Giuliani’s become what Grandpa would call a ‘putz’ (read: dumb schmuck) who was reduced to standing in front of some supermarkets in Queens handing out leaflets for his son’s gubernatorial campaign which ended up with the younger Giuliani losing the GOP primary by more than 20 points.
As for Poppa Giuliani, he’s now just another one of the guys who may go down the tubes for trying to keep Donald Trump in the White House after the 2020 vote. In an advertisement for a new biography on Rudy which the author, Andrew Kirtzman, peddled as a weekend op-ed in The New York Times, Giuliani is quoted as saying that he’ll be remembered for ‘lying for Trump.’
What he’ll really be remembered for was the loony press conference he held during the 2020 campaign in front of a lawn-care company in Philadelphia located across the street from a porn shop that shared a building with a crematory. Maybe the single, best political picture I have in my computer memory is a picture from that bizarre event which I’ll post right here:
Incidentally, you can’t make him out but the guy standing directly behind Rudy is Bernard Kerik, and it's what his relationship to Rudy represents is really what Giuliani is all about.
Giuliani, as noted in the NYT op-ed piece, used Kerik as a prop in many of his escapades. Kerik was appointed New York City Police Commissioner by Giuliani and was at Rudy’s side after the 9-11 attack. What Kirtzman’s op-ed doesn’t mention is that Kerik then joined Rudy in the attempt to cash in on their post 9-11 notoriety with this phony operation known as Giuliani Partners, which then became something called Giuliani Capital Advisers, which then became what Grandpa would call ‘gurnisht helfen’ (read: nothing at all.)
Giuliani Partners involved Giuliani giving speeches to officials of governments that were worried about terrorist attacks and telling these folks how to prepare for an attack as well as how to respond after an attack occurred. Following his speech, Giuliani would invite his audience to sign up for a special terrorism seminar conducted in D.C. by the FBI and would collect a registration fee that he would split with the FBI.
Except what Giuliani didn’t tell his audience was that the FBI was running these seminars without any input from Giuliani, and government officials from other countries could register for the course directly with the FBI – they didn’t have to go through Giuliani or pay Giuliani anything at all.
Once the word got around that Giuliani was actually scamming his audiences and making believe that the FBI seminars were delivered only for his groups, that was the end of that scheme and in 2005, Giuliani Partners morphed into something called Giuliani Capital Advisers which lasted less than one year.
To move into merchant banking, Giuliani hired Steve Oesterle, who had been an officer and big shot at Ernst & Young. Obviously, by the time Giuliani hired Oesterle, the stench was beginning to be noticed, because in a later biography that Oesterle published after leaving Giuliani, he described himself as “Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of a boutique investment bank specializing in corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate restructuring.” Note the absence of Giuliani’s name.
As for Rudy’s partner, Bernie Kerik, he was also some piece of work in his own right. He withdrew his nomination to be head of Homeland Security under Bush because he had employed a housekeeper who didn’t have a green card. That was the least of his problems.
It then turned out that when he was Commissioner of Corrections, he hired some goombah construction company to renovate his house. He then had this bunch submit invoices to the city as if they had done the wok on one of the jails. Kerik ended up doing four years in the clink but of course was later pardoned by Trump.
Rudy did the same thing. The reason he dropped out of the 2008 GOP primaries was because a week before the Florida primary, he New York media broke a story about how he used a police helicopter to bring his girlfriend out to a motel on Long Island where they were having a long-running affair. Did he reimburse the city for the cost of this weekly flight? Of course not.
Kirtzman was interviewed last night on CNN and repeated the same thing he is saying in the book, which is that Rudy ended up tied to Trump because after his abortive run for President, this was his way of getting back into the game. I’ll have the book tomorrow, so I don’t yet want to discuss the way Kirtzman frames his portrait of Rudy G - right now let me just say this.
Cohen, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, Rudy, et. al. Has there ever been a President who was surrounded by so many scumbags who used their access to the Oval Office to make rotten deals for themselves? When Eisenhower was President, his staff chief, Sherman Adams, was forced to resign because he accepted a gift of a vicuna coat by some crook who was looking to sew up some kind of government deal.
That was a big scandal back then – a fur coat. And by the way, Adams was never pardoned by his former boss the way that Trump pardoned all these shysters during his Presidential term.
Which is really Rudy’s problem right now because if he ends up getting charged for lying about this or lying about that, who’s going to save him from spending a couple of years at Butner, which is where Bernard Madoff ended up?