Questions Arise About Giuliani's N.Y. Security Bills

CNN's Anderson Cooper, who had a bit of a rocky evening as moderator of the CNN/YouTube Republican debate, had one brief "stop the presses" moment Wednesday night. It came when he asked former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani about a report Politico published on its Web site shortly before the debate.

Politico reported that previously undisclosed government records showed that Giuliani had billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses while mayor. The expenses for his police security detail were incurred during trips to the Hamptons during the period when he was beginning his extramarital relationship with his current wife, Judith Nathan, who lived there.

Giuliani's office refused to explain the unusual accounting to city auditors at the time, citing "security." But auditors looking at expenses in 1999 and 2000 "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes," the city's comptroller wrote in a letter Politico obtained.

"First of all, it's not true," Giuliani said during the debate. "I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't. And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them."

But Giuliani didn't offer an explanation for why the expenses were billed to agencies like the Office for People with Disabilities.

The Associated Press notes that the "the suggestion, true or not, that he was hiding expenses for liaisons with Nathan in little-known city accounts, could open him up to criticism, remind voters of his three marriages and infidelity and tarnish his good-guy image from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

10:49 AM ET | 11-29-2007 | permalink