More on the Rudy Implosion

Here's a snip of the New York Times' piece on the impending Rudy implosion:

City Said to Have Paid Bills as Giuliani Affair Began
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Late in his tenure as mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani billed tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses to little-known city agencies as he was beginning an extramarital affair, a political Web site reported yesterday.

The report, on the Politico Web site, cited documents obtained under the New York State Freedom of Information Law. But it was unclear from those documents whether Mr. Giuliani allocated those travel costs, from 1999 through 2001, to obscure city offices in an attempt to conceal expenses associated with the relationship or for some accounting purpose.

The administration of Mr. Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said in 2002, several months after taking office, that the Giuliani administration had kept the budget for the mayor’s office artificially low by paying more than $5 million in salaries through other city agencies. The agencies to which Mr. Giuliani billed the travel expenses were outside the mayor’s office.

The New York mayor always travels with a security detail, and the expenses for the police detectives assigned to protect him are normally paid for by the Police Department when he travels on city business.

Asked about the travel expenses during the Republican presidential candidates’ debate last night, Mr. Giuliani denied any wrongdoing. 'I have nothing to do with the handling of their records,' he said. As far as he knew, he said, the records were handled appropriately.

One of Mr. Giuliani’s chief political advisers, Anthony V. Carbonetti, said earlier yesterday that any suggestion that the former mayor had sought to hide anything was 'nonsense.'

'As far as we are concerned, these are all legitimate expenses incurred by the N.Y.P.D. while performing their duty protecting the mayor,' Mr. Carbonetti said.

Mr. Carbonetti told reporters, 'There was no effort to hide anything — on the mayor’s part definitely because this is stuff he has never seen.'