Details of Rudy's "Sex on the City" Show an Assumption of Impunity

Wouldn’t you like to have this letter and an accompanying check delivered to your Amex account?

Wonder why the city of New York chose to prepay $400,000 in travel to an American Express charge account for its Assigned Counsel Administrative Office in June of 2001? It sure wasn’t because lawyers for indigent clients have a blank checkbook for expenses. It certainly wasn’t to save the City of New York money, which could have been sitting in interest-bearing accounts until the incoming Bloomberg Administration requested the remaining funds be returned the following year.

The answer, we now know, lies in keeping prying eyes away from the details of Judi Nathan and Rudy Giuliani’s travel trysts, just the way scrutiny had previously been diverted in 2000 by travel expenses charged in advance the same way to the City’s Loft Board.

It's the details that get even more interesting. The practice shifted from the Loft
Board only after the city Comptroller’s office audited the Board's expenditures and was met with a refusal to itemize the suspect expenses by the Mayor’s Office. Instead of stopping the practice, the “Sex on the City” Mayor simply shifted the funding to another city department. It’s not the city carting Rudy’s mistress around that‘s most galling. It’s the arrogance of assuming Rudy could hide it again, after being called on it once, that should tick off anyone paying taxes.

This the kind of autocratic brinksmanship and chutzpah that New Yorkers came to know as the Giuliani Years. America is just now beginning to experience it.

(References: Politico and TPM)