Rudy Giuliani is doing some part-time work in between denunciations of Hillary Clinton.
Ten months into his presidential bid, Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to work part time at the security consulting firm he promised to leave this past spring to focus on his pursuit of the Republican nomination.
I could snark about how someone confident in winning the nomination wouldn’t be keeping his old job, or I could joke that he’s just keeping it for the health insurance, because buying his own with that pre-existing condition is such a nightmare. But there’s actually a serious part to this.
Several of the firm’s employees do volunteer work for his campaign. And Giuliani did not decide until mid-June, six months after he entered the race, to bill his campaign for the cost of the security detail traveling with him on campaign trips; before then, the firm paid the expense [...]
Federal election laws prohibit Giuliani’s firm from absorbing costs or providing services that legally should be covered by political donations, campaign experts said.
“This is a lawyer’s nightmare,” said Republican political consultant Scott Reed, who ran the 1996 presidential bid of then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) but is not aligned with a presidential campaign in this race. “I don’t think the vulnerability is with voters on the level of his commitment to the race. The concern is really about FEC violations and whether anything this corporation does to help him essentially is making a contribution to run for president in the form of staff time, materials, travel billing or security.”
And since Giuliani clearly believes that the law doesn’t apply to him, I don’t see him caring much about that. The question is whether or not the FEC will do their job. What’s funny is that this is the guy running as a law and order candidate. But he also refuses to give anybody else credit for his achievements, which could explain why he wants to run a campaign and a security firm at the same time. And by running for President the way he ran for mayor, these pieces of petty graft are possibly the best we can hope for:
There is one final matter to consider: Giuliani’s claim that what he accomplished in New York is “transferable” to the nation as a whole. Put simply, that idea is impossible, disastrous, or entirely misleading [...] In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding
community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.”This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the nypd went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the “neighborhoods” Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other “neighborhoods,” such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.
Maybe it’s good that he’s still collecting a paycheck outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; it’s better than the alternative.
Something to say?
