Mike Lupica is being a total Debbie Downer. Just because he remembered about how Rudy Giuliani named a big ol’ building — the city jail! — after Bernie Kerik, Lupica has to go and spoil the Guiliani Legend for the rest of us:

Six years later, that is more interesting than ever, a jail being named after Kerik, just because one of these days he could end up inside one.

First, Giuliani made Kerik - who used to drive him around on weekends - correction commissioner in New York, after Kerik had run one jail in his life, in Passaic County. Then Giuliani made him police commissioner, though Kerik had just a total of eight years on the books as a cop.

So there was Bernie Kerik in charge of the NYPD when the planes hit on Sept. 11, and suddenly he was perceived to be almost as brave and noble as his boss just by standing there next to him. Suddenly, there was this idea that the two of them had somehow looked terrorism in the eye and stared it down, when neither one of them did anything of the kind. All they did was help pick up the pieces along with everybody else.

Boooooooo! Rudy was a hero, remember? A hero! And Bernie Kerik was totally qualified and nobody knew he was mobbed up and Rudy saved 9/11 and one day the Beatles are getting back together!

Is this whole Kerik thing the thin end of the wedge when it comes to prying apart the Giuliani myth?

Advisors, Rudy Giuliani | 3 Comments »

Bernie Kerik, this is your life:

— Allegedly traded $165,000 worth of renovations on his house from a contractor who wanted a license from the city.

– Used the apartment donated for weary Ground Zero rescue workers into his own personal love nest to use with his mistress.

– Was named in a civil suit in 1999 as “the architect of a system to force prison guards to work for Republicans in their off-hours.”

– Had mob ties that include the best man in his wedding, Lawrence Ray, who was indicted in 2000 along with other organized crime figures in a scheme to manipulate the stock market.

And today, that ended in an indictment on multiple counts of corruption and tax evasion.

Apparently, Rudy has come out and admitted a mistake for not vetting Kerik more vigorously when he was hired as police commissioner.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani said he “made a mistake” by not vetting his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, indicted today in a public corruption case. Giuliani also said he wouldn’t contribute to Kerik’s legal defense fund because it “wouldn’t be appropriate.”

But Giuliani also said the experience would make him a better president, defended the job Kerik did as police commissioner and compared his former protégé to the late President Richard Nixon — a man with both flaws and accomplishments.

Somehow, I don’t see comparing Kerik to Nixon - you know, in a good way - is going to resonate with the public.

Advisors, Rudy Giuliani | 1 Comment »

Is God punishing Rudy Giuliani for the Pat Robertson endorsement? Maybe or maybe not, but you could see Rudy’s latest ordeal coming for a long time. So now Federal prosecutors are about to seek an indictment of Rudy’s pal and protoge, Bernie Kerik:

The grand jury, convening in Westchester County, has heard evidence about Mr. Kerik for about a year as part of a broad federal inquiry into a variety of issues, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

Prosecutors are also seeking to charge Mr. Kerik, 52, with failing to report as income more than $200,000 in rent that they say was paid on his behalf to use a luxury Upper East Side apartment where he lived with his family around the time he left his city post, the people briefed on the case said.

TalkLeft has a bunch of excellent links for more reading on Giuliani’s Kerik troubles.

Curiously, the right blogosphere hasn’t been quick to pick up the story.

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Ba-Da Bing Bernie… time’s up.

Federal prosecutors are scheduled to seek a grand jury indictment on Thursday of Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, on a list of charges that include tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy counts, according to people who have been briefed on the case.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, N.Y., has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for about a year as part of a broad federal inquiry into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

Prosecutors are also seeking to charge Mr. Kerik with failing to report as income more than $200,000 in rent that is alleged to have been paid on his behalf to use a luxury Upper East Side apartment where he lived with his family around the time he left his city post, the people who were briefed said.

But hey, Kerik happened to be in the Police Commissioner’s post when William Bratton’s crime policies and William Jefferson Clinton’s COPS program helped make New York safer, so that puts him well above the law. Even if some of these criminally indictable actions occurred before he assumed that post, and his boss Rudy Giuliani knew it, and ignored them altogether.

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Rudy Giuliani told the Associated Press:

“Bernie Kerik worked for me while I was mayor of New York City,’’ Mr. Giuliani told Philip Elliott of the A.P. “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime, a correction program that went from being one of the worst in the country to one that was on ‘60 Minutes’ as one of the best in the country, 90 percent reduction of violence in the jails.”

“Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape,” Mr. Giuliani said.

Somebody may want to double check those figures. Word has it that Giuliani is loose with the numbers.

Advisors, Rudy Giuliani | 1 Comment »

Sunday’s Washington Post added a new name to the endless list of Republican campaign associates/criminals this election cycle.

Republican presidential candidate Fred D. Thompson has been crisscrossing the country since early this summer on a private jet lent to him by a businessman and close adviser who has a criminal record for drug dealing.

Thompson selected the businessman, Philip Martin, to raise seed money for his White House bid. Martin is one of four campaign co-chairmen and the head of a group called the “first day founders.” Campaign aides jokingly began to refer to Martin, who has been friends with Thompson since the early 1990s, as the head of “Thompson’s Airforce.”

Here’s Phil Martin’s rap sheet:

Martin entered a plea of guilty to the sale of 11 pounds of marijuana in 1979; the court withheld judgment pending completion of his probation. He was charged in 1983 with violating his probation and with multiple counts of felony bookmaking, cocaine trafficking and conspiracy. He pleaded no contest to the cocaine-trafficking and conspiracy charges, which stemmed from a plan to sell $30,000 worth of the drug, and was continued on probation. […]

Archived Florida court records provide details of the various cases against Martin, including alleged sports-betting activity, a cocaine deal he arranged with an undercover sheriff’s deputy and carried out through a middleman, and the sale of 11 pounds of marijuana to an undercover detective for $3,400. Martin produced the marijuana from the trunk of his 1973 Cadillac as he and the detective were parked behind a Tampa area department store, according to the arrest report.

According to court records, close friends and an ex-wife, Martin arrived in Tennessee from Tampa about 1985 while serving probation for his various offenses. He set up a series of businesses, starting with the Puzzle’s Pizza parlor. He opened a hardware store, and friends say he began trying to recruit business partners for more ambitious real estate ventures.

Tell me if you heard this one from another leading Republican candidate:

Thompson’s campaign said the candidate was not aware of the multiple criminal cases, for which Martin served no jail time. All are described in public court records.

Karen Hanretty, Thompson’s deputy communications director, said yesterday that “Senator Thompson was unaware of the information until this afternoon. Phil Martin has been a friend of the senator since the mid-1990s and remains so today.” Thompson communications director Todd Harris added that Martin was not subjected to the campaign’s standard vetting process because “he’s a longtime friend.”

“There’s not a campaign in the world that has the ability to research every one of its supporters going back more than 20 years,” Harris said.

The Post digs into the Thompson campaign’s dealings with Martin:

Martin has been more than just a key fundraiser to Thompson, though. The use of his plane eases a major logistical burden stemming from the intense demands on presidential candidates this year for appearances in more than 20 states holding early primaries. It also may have saved the campaign at least $120,000, given that Federal Election Commission rules allowed Thompson to reimburse Martin for the use of the private jet at the commercial ticket rate until Congress changed the rules in September.

Thompson has reported reimbursing Martin $102,330, without specifying precisely where he flew on the plane, or when. But a comparison of flight records for the plane, kept by the tracking firm FlightAware, and news accounts of Thompson’s campaign appearances this year shows that since June the plane has made more than two dozen stops that coincided with Thompson campaign events.

(Hat tip: Jeralyn Merritt, TalkLeft)

Advisors, Fred Thompson | 1 Comment »

Today’s New York Times takes a comprehensive look at the Bernie Kerik saga — the story that would, in a rational world, have already meant the end of Rudy Giuliani’s political career. The long and detailed description of Kerik’s corruption is worth reading on its own. On a larger level, the article paints a disturbing picture of Giuliani’s poor personal judgment and his questionable grasp of the notion of honest public service.

The article begins by putting the lie to Giuliani’s claim that he had never been briefed on Kerik’s links to organized crime prior to naming his friend police commissioner. Giuliani himself amended that claim last year, acknowledging that the city investigations commissioner, Edward Kuriansky, had said that he had briefed the mayor on the subject at least once — though Giuliani claimed not to remember the briefing.

But a review of Mr. Kuriansky’s diaries, and investigators’ notes from a 2004 interview with him, now indicate that such a session indeed took place. What is more, Mr. Kuriansky also recalled briefing one of Mr. Giuliani’s closest aides, Dennison Young Jr., about Mr. Kerik’s entanglements with the [mob-linked] company just days before the police appointment, according to the diaries he compiled at the time and his later recollection to the investigators.

Let’s return again to just how remarkable this is. Giuliani claims he doesn’t remember being told that the man he was about to nominate to command the New York City police department had ties to organized crime. That’s like not remembering when you were warned that the person you hired to babysit your kids was a convicted sex offender. What’s more, I just cannot believe that the matter just somehow slipped between the cracks in Dennison Young’s attention. If someone tells a political aide that the man his boss is vouching for is connected to the mob, he should run into the boss’s office waving a giant red flag.

Of course, part of the problem here was that Giuliani had already degraded the ability of the system to do its job. When Kuriansky briefed Giuliani and Young on Kerik’s ties to the apparently mobbed-up construction firm Interstate Industrial, he “knew that Mr. Kerik had intervened on behalf of a firm suspected of mob ties and that the commissioner’s brother and best friend worked for the company.” He didn’t know that Interstate had paid $165,000 to renovate Kerik’s apartment.

The city investigations agency is set up to provide an internal check and balance on political appointments, conducting background checks on official nominees.

But Mr. Giuliani had torn down that wall, senior investigators said, appointing friends like Mr. Kuriansky as commissioner and having them attend his morning meetings.

Giuliani wants to hire his friend to be police commissioner (despite, the article reveals, the opposition of more than half of his cabinet). The man in charge of vetting him is another friend. Giuliani’s administration starts to look less like a government and more like, well… a family:

Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani’s boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who was first deputy mayor, and other aides. One by one, they pulled Mr. Kerik close and kissed his cheek.

“I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a mafia family,” Mr. Kerik wrote. “I was being made.”

That was the first time Rudy promoted Bernie — when he took a foul-mouthed ex-detective with one year’s experience in the Correction Department and made him first deputy correction commissioner. Rudy, the article points out again and again, is fiercely loyal to his friends, and there’s plenty of evidence that that loyalty too often trumps both common sense and the public interest. His dogged support of Kerik put Rudy — either knowingly or, unforgiveably unwittingly — just two or three degrees of separation away from the mob. In his governing style, at least, Rudy sometimes seemed even closer to that world.

Advisors, Rudy Giuliani | 11 Comments »

The departure of more staffers hasn’t got Fred Thompson down one bit. In fact, from the looks of this article, he didn’t know they were on staff in the first place.

Republican Fred Thompson played down a staff member’s departure and a New Hampshire supporter’s defection Wednesday, saying it’s not up to him to know what’s going on at every level of his presidential campaign.

“This is a campaign with a lot of different moving parts and a lot of things going on simultaneously,” Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press […]

“You know, the campaign can address that. I can’t really address who’s doing — and who was doing — exactly what at every level of this campaign,” Thompson said after speaking to about 300 people at a restaurant in South Carolina. “They’re the ones who know what’s going on on a daily basis. … I’ll let the experts speak on that.”

The CAMPAIGN can address that? Aren’t you the campaign? Aren’t you supposed to know what’s going on, at least a little bit? Shouldn’t you be the expert?

Meanwhile, Thompson managed to round up enough experts to write his first policy statement yesterday. Guess what, it’s about those damn illegals. Reports have it that Fred doesn’t know how many illegal immigrants are in the country and it’s not his job to know and anyway he didn’t write the policy so leave him alone while he eats yogurt.

Advisors, Fred Thompson | 5 Comments »

“Giuliani Defends, Employs Priest Accused of Molesting Teens”

It’s a somewhat old story, covered briefly on TRF before, but the investigative report from Brian Ross uncovers some new details. First of all, Monsignor Alan Placa, the priest accused of molestation, is STILL working for Giuliani Partners. Second, he was hired AFTER the accusers came forward and the church requested that he stop performing priestly duties.

“This man did unjust things, and he’s being protected and employed and taken care of. It’s not a good thing,” said one of the accusers, Richard Tollner, who says Placa molested him repeatedly when he was a student at a Long Island, N.Y. Catholic boys high school in 1975.

At a campaign appearance in Milwaukee last week, Giuliani continued to defend Placa, who he described to reporters as a close friend for 39 years.

“I know the man; I know who he is, so I support him,” Giuliani said. “We give some of the worst people in our society the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt,” he said. “And, of course, I’m going to give that to one of my closest friends.”

There’s not going to be any accountability, so it’s easy for Giuliani to say that. This actually would be prosecuted, were is not for a statute of limitations (the accuser described actions from 1975), as well as obfuscatory church policy, under orders directly from Rome, in which Placa participated, using “deception and intimidation,” according to grand jury documents.

The appearance from Richard Tollner, the accuser and now a mortgage broker on Long Island, is lurid.

Tollner, now a mortgage broker in Albany, N.Y., says he was one of three people to testify about Placa.

“This man harmed children. He still could do it. He deserves to be shown for what he was, or is,” says Tollner.

Appearing publicly for the first time today on ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” Tollner says the abuse started when he and Placa were in the high school making posters for a Right to Life march.

“As he started to explain how these posters should be done, I realized that something was rubbing my body,” Tollner said. “After a minute or two, I realized that he’s feeling me, feeling me in my genital area.”

According to the story, the Giuliani campaign SOUGHT OUT former students from the same high school and asked them to “contact ABC News and vouch for Placa.” There are dozens of pictures of Giuliani with Placa, too. And really, this is another example of where Rudy can credibly be judged by the company he keeps.

The man named yesterday by the Giuliani campaign to a law enforcement outreach campaign post in Minnesota was forced to resign a government job in 2004 when proof surfaced that he’d admitted to repeatedly using the word “nigger” in the past, Election Central has learned.

Sheriff Richard Stanek was appointed to the post of chair of Minnesota Law Enforcement for Rudy. The campaign’s press release promised that Stanek “will work with law enforcement personnel throughout the state to communicate Mayor Giuliani’s record of fighting crime and his commitment to first responders.”

But as a rival campaign has pointed out to us, it turns out Stanek has admitted to having a history of racially charged remarks. He was forced to resign his post as Minnesota’s public safety commissioner in 2004 after it came to light that he’d admitted in a deposition that he’d used racist slurs in the past, including repeated use of the word “nigger.”

Steve Benen has a list of Giuliani’s associates, which could fill a lineup.

This one in particular could snowball.

Updated 10/23/07 at 1:36pm by Matt Ortega: Here’s the video from ABC’s Good Morning America.

Advisors, Rudy Giuliani | 7 Comments »

This is an almost incomparable statement for any military member to make, let along one who has just become Mitt Romney’s National Security Adviser.

TOM FOREMAN (voice-over): If you could save the life of a soldier, rescue the hostage children; stop the next terrorist bomb by torturing a prisoner for information, would you do it?
JAMES “SPIDER” MARKS, MAJOR GENERAL, U.S. ARMY (RET.): I’d stick a knife in somebody’s thigh in a heartbeat.

FOREMAN (on camera): Retired General “Spider” Marks, a CNN consultant, worked for U.S. Army Intelligence, teaching interrogation.

MARKS: The kinds of enemies we’re fighting have no sense of right or wrong. They will go to any depths to achieve their ends.

FOREMAN: Do we have to go with them?

MARKS: We don’t need to go with them. We need to preclude them from going there. And that might include some use of torture in order to prevent it.

The problem here is that the “A Team” of nutjob ideologues has been discredited by the Bush Administration and now we’re getting the B Team. So we get advisers who would gladly stab someone with a knife to meet their own ends, and who would even bother to answer such a ridiculous “ticking bomb” scenario that pretty much never happens in reality. Such stabbing wouldn’t yield even half-decent information, would increase the risk to our own troops, and would put us in the morally debased position we find ourselves in today. It’s unconscionable to turn to lunatics like this for advice.

Advisors, Mitt Romney | 2 Comments »