On Wednesday, the New York Times added a twist to the humiliating story surrounding Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik. Apparently, celebrity book publisher Judith Regan alleges in a new lawsuit that a News Corp. executive urged her to lie about her extramarital affair with Kerik in order to protect Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. It was probably not the distraction the Giuliani campaign was hoping for.
By Wednesday night, media personalities sympathetic to Giuliani were already dismissing the relevance of the story, insisting that it had nothing to do with the former mayor directly. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, without a hint of irony, told his audience, “You know what it strikes me as? A media echo chamber here.” (Digby responded, “Here you have a juicy scandal involving possible collusion between a presidential candidate and a rival network, and old Chris just can’t wrap his mind around it.”)
Matthews’ confusion notwithstanding, Frank Rich argues today that Regan “knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.”
Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.
Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.” Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.
Stay tuned.