IS THIS THE WAY GIULIANI WOULD RUN THE FEDERAL BUDGET?

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NY POST - Rudy Giuliani said yesterday that obscure city agencies were
billed for the out-of-town credit-card charges of his mayoral security
detail because the NYPD was so slow in paying its bills. Hoping to limit
the fallout on his presidential campaign, Giuliani told CBS's Katie
Couric that the practice began during his first term and was a matter of
convenience - not a sinister plot to hide expenses like time spent with
then-girlfriend Judith Nathan. . .

Former Mayor Ed Koch, a frequent Giuliani critic who is supporting
Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, wasn't buying the explanation.
"It's an outrageous way to govern," charged Koch. "In my judgment it's
unwarranted and indefensible." Joe DeVincenzo, a former special
assistant to Koch, said the NYPD during Koch's tenure didn't have a
problem paying expenses of the mayor's police detail directly. Jonathan
Gradees, executive director of New York State Defenders, was especially
distressed at the $400,000 of travel bills paid through the Assigned
Counsel Plan in fiscal 2001. The plan, which provides city-paid lawyers
for indigent criminal defendants, was in financial turmoil that year,
Gradees recalled. "It really was a moment in time when the last thing
you'd want to do is dip into the till," he said.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11302007/news/regionalnews/
rudy_pin_blame_on_nypd_887456.htm


TPM MUCKRAKER - In comments to the Politico, Anthony Carbonetti, a
longtime aide to Rudy Giuliani and his chief of staff when he was mayor,
told Ben Smith that this was the first he'd heard that the city
comptroller had been asking about the mayor's charges to backwater
agencies.

So we asked the city comptroller's office. And spokesman Jeff Simmons
told us that the audit, which focused on $34,000 of travel charges to
one of those obscure agencies, the New York City Loft Board, had indeed
begun in 2001, when Rudy was still mayor. The comptroller had made
"repeated requests to the Loft Board and Mayor's Office for further
information and was stonewalled," he said.

Of course, that stonewalling has continued in the Bloomberg
administration, which has refused to discuss the charges, citing
"security," although they did refer the matter to the city Department of
Investigations, where it seems to have disappeared.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004809.php

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MORE GIULIANI FUNNY MONEY

PAUL KIEL AND GREG SARGENT, TPM MUCKRAKER - We've been swimming in
credit card receipts from Rudy Giuliani's administration, and one thing
in particular has struck us: in 2001, apparently with an eye to future
globetrotting, Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to
American Express. Though it was billed to the Assigned Counsel
Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent
defendants, the money served as an advance against future travel and
other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security
detail.

The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the
theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting gimmicks to
obscure his office's travel expenditures.

With $400,000 prepaid on the Amex account, the mayor and his staff drew
down on the credit card for a number of trips, including a handful out
to the Hamptons, where Judith Nathan had her condo. Giuliani's
administration ultimately spent approximately $100,000 of the $400,000
before leaving office in January, 2001.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, confirmed to us that his
administration put a stop to the practice of putting funds for future
travel in bulk on a credit card. Shortly after Bloomberg took office,
American Express refunded $298,000, the remaining unused balance on the
account. The move came shortly after the city comptroller sent the mayor
a letter critical of the Giuliani adminsitration's practice of billing
obscure city agencies for mayoral travel expenses.

But Loeser declined to comment when asked directly why the
administration did this, and declined to comment when asked directly if
the Bloomberg administration thought the Giuliani approach was
problematic. "We process spending and travel differently," he said. "We
use a different method. If we have government funded travel, we go
through the city's travel agent.". . .

Giuliani's administration had done a similar thing in June of 2000,
cutting checks for $54,000 worth of "prepayment" and billing them to the
New York City Loft Board and other backwater agencies.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004811.php

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