When it comes to secrecy, it’s hard to match Dick Cheney. Man-size safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business in Cheney’s office. No one is allowed to know who works in his office. The VP has even created his own classified designation for all of his documents — materials are stamped “Treated As: Top Secret/SCI” — including mundane papers like talking points for reporters.
As far as we know, Rudy Giuliani isn’t quite that bad, but he’s certainly in the same league.
When a mayor of New York leaves office, little goes out the door but memories — unless he’s Rudy Giuliani. Government rules discourage the city’s most powerful officeholder from departing with more than token gifts collected on the job.
Ed Koch, mayor from 1978 to 1989, recalls keeping some neckties. His successor, David Dinkins, walked away with knickknacks from his desk, including a crystal tennis ball and a collection of photographs documenting his meetings with celebrities and business icons.
When Giuliani stepped down, he needed a warehouse.
Under an unprecedented agreement that didn’t become public until after he left office, Giuliani secreted out of City Hall the written, photographic and electronic record of his eight years in office — more than 2,000 boxes. (emphasis added)
At a recent debate, Giuliani boasted that his mayoral administration reached the pinnacle of transparency: “I can’t think of a public figure that’s had a more transparent life than I’ve had.”
The reality, of course, is the complete opposite. He not only left office with thousands of boxes of documents Giuliani didn’t want to go public, but he also quietly secured the materials of his deputy mayors, his chief of staff, his travel office and his official residence. While in office, Giuliani sought to limit public access to information on such mundane matters as working water fountains in city parks and the city’s recycling program.
The campaign responded to all of this, calling questions about Giuliani’s penchant for secrecy “nitpicking.” Seriously.
And speaking of Giuliani, I’ve been meaning to mention an NYT report late last week, which said it is “not likely” that Giuliani shifted city funds around obscure budgets in the hopes of hiding the costs of his adultery. Some conservatives considered Giuliani exonerated by the report, and felt a little bitter when it didn’t get bigger play. (Chris Matthews, in particular, was quick to tout Giuliani’s innocence.)
Josh Marshall, who played a major role in advancing the story, explains why the NYT report hardly ends the controversy.
If what the Times reported comes as a surprise, it shouldn’t. Because it’s what we were reporting as far back as November 30th. The initial story in the Politico suggested that the accounting funny business was intended to hide Rudy’s shagging visits. But a look at the records themselves didn’t bear that out. The real story was that late in his administration Rudy’s team started putting more and more expenses effectively off the books to hide his increasingly high-living ways because he’d made a big point publicly about how he’d reduced spending in the mayor’s office. […]
That was basically the argument Rudy’s team was making — that whatever fishy accounting techniques they were using, they were using them to cover Shag and non-Shag funding a like — actually mainly non-Shag funding — so the aim couldn’t be to conceal his affair. That was basically right, only it was in the nature of things, not surprisingly, a difficult argument to make: We weren’t just hiding shag, we were hiding everything!
And that wasn’t the worst of his problems. The burst of press attention focused a bright light on something that had been partly known in the NYC press but had been the subject of little scrutiny during this campaign: the fact that as Mayor Rudy expended tens or perhaps hundreds of thousand of taxpayer dollars on his mistress while his wife and kids were still ensconced at the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion.
It wasn’t just the Shag trips to the Hamptons, that was the least of it. It was NYPD security detail he had assigned to Nathan before their affair was even known — on the basis to fairly obviously bogus ‘threats’ she face. The personal NYPD-expensed valet service she, her friends and family enjoyed thanks to Rudy. Even the NYPD-dog walking.
Giuliani got a bum wrap? I don’t think so.