Rudy and Judy

This hit the fan yesterday.

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.

More details:

The practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani's security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.

The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.

There were also expenses buried in the accounts of offices assigned to helping the disabled and for providing legal assistance to indigent defendants. Another interesting bit:

Nathan would go on to become Giuliani’s third wife, but his second marriage was officially intact until the spring of 2000, and City Hall officials at the time responded to questions about his absences by saying he was spending time with his son and playing golf.

So the Giuliani administration hid the expenses so that no one would know about the extramarital affair the then-Mayor of New York was having then they used his son as a cover story to further lie about the affair itself.

Never fear, Rudy's responded:

First of all, it's not true. 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," Giuliani said. "I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately.

Which leads Josh Marshall to write:

So he sort of denies it. But he actually just said he left it to the police and he figures they did it right. "They handled them in the way they handled them" -- what you might call Rudy's trademark aggressive truism.

Read closely, Rudy isn't denying anything. He's just saying he's not responsible.

He says the security detail went with me everywhere, i.e., they had to come when I went to visit Judy too. And I can't be responsible for where they billed the expense to. So Rudy's argument is that in the city he runs, actually in the office of the mayor, someone else was hiding these charges to shield the affair. But not him and he didn't know about it.

But the AP article notes that it was the tab was ultimately picked up elsewhere:

Later, an aide said that for accounting purposes, the expenses appear to have been temporarily allocated to city offices and paid for out of the mayor's budget but that the police department ultimately picked up the tab and reimbursed the mayor's office at the end of each year.

I wonder how the media, obsessed as it was for a while about John Edwards' haircuts or Hillary Clinton's cleavage will deal with Rudy Giuliani's taxpayer funded infidelities.

And since he's a Republican, when can we expect to hear an outcry from God's Own Party about how a frontrunner for that party's nomination as President of the United States was routinely breaking (by my count) three of the Ten Commandments while the taxpayers were paying for the security for his infidelities?