Rudy billed NY agencies for time in LI Lovenest by demkat620 [Subscribe]
Wed Nov 28, 2007 at 12:42:03 PM PST
According to a new article by Ben Smith at the Politico, Rudy may have billed thousands of dollars to obscure New York agencies for weekend getaways with Judith Nathan on Long Island.
According to Smith who acquired the documents with a FOIA request:
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records. The documents, obtained by Politico under New Yorks Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
Could this be more of Rudy's skeletons falling out of the closet?
Smith also reports some of the details of that travel.
The first trip to Southampton appearing in the travel documents runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, 1999. Four police officers spent the night at the Atlantic Utopia Lifestyle Inn, according to an approval request for official out-of-city travel, billing the city $1,016.20.
Giulianis private schedule, available from the municipal archive, lists no events on Long Island that day.
And how did these expenses first come to light you ask?
The billing practices, however, drew formal attention on Jan. 24, 2002, when Thompson, the city comptroller, wrote the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a confidential letter. One of his auditors, he wrote, had stumbled upon the unexplained travel expenses during a routine audit of the Loft Board, a tiny branch of city government that regulates certain apartments.
Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People With Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.
The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.
And oh, how about when these trips occurred?
The trips themselves were a departure for a mayor who had prided himself on spending every waking moment in the city and on the job, and offer a glimpse into the dramatic and controversial finale to his tenure in office. Receipts show him in Southampton every weekend in August and the first weekend in September of 2001, before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 disrupted the routines of his city.
So Rudy was shacking up with Nathan, billing the city for his travel and expenses, hiding those expenses by spreading them around to various agencies and doing all this in the time leading up to September 11th.
This story is also the screamer headline on Drudge and you just gotta wonder who put the bug in Smith's ear. Was it Bloomberg or one of the other campaigns or maybe the other Judy? Who knows but this is not the last shoe to drop with the Rudy! campaign.