I knew Judy Giuliani when she was married to Bruce Nathan, not that this makes any difference at all. Whitney, their adopted daughter, was in the same pre-school class with my oldest daughter, then they played basketball together and were confirmed in the same confirmation class at Brick Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. It was at the celebration after the confirmation ceremony in 1997 that Judy told me, quietly, that she was seeing Rudy Giuliani. I believe that if he had his way, Rudy would just be an Attorney, working to keep corporate buddies in their jobs, but Judy wants him to be a national figure and is telling him he has to run for President so she can fulfill her lifelong dream of being First Lady.

Rudy cannot get rid of his skeletons. Read Wayne Barrett's excellent book on Rudy's corruption when he was Mayor of New York City, Grand Illusion.

My opinion.

Betsy Combier

Rudy's Cozy Murdoch Ties
The unholy alliance of press and politics happens here, too. Giuliani did enormous favors for Fox TV in New York City, and his wife’s earnings from Fox tripled while he was mayor.
by Wayne Barrett, July 21, 2011
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On the eve of Rupert Murdoch’s appearance before Parliament this week, Rudy Giuliani, fresh from his latest pre-presidential forays to New Hampshire, went on CNN to defend his old friend and patron. Knighted by the British for his much-monetized heroism on the day of the 9/11 attacks, former crime buster Giuliani, who once paraded Wall Street brokers out of their offices in handcuffs only to later drop the charges against them, delivered a wide-eyed lecture on “the presumption of innocence.” He called Murdoch a “very honorable, honest man,” noting that all the hacking and bribing offenses that occurred on News Corp. payrolls “can’t be something that he would have had anything to do with,” a statement that went beyond presuming innocence to declaring it.

The Rudy-Rupert relationship is in fact as close as we come in America to understanding the hubbub now consuming the U.K. It is a tale of transactional journalism that goes to the heart of everything long wrong in the Murdoch empire, where politicians are acquired as frequently as businesses, and mergers occur at personal as well as corporate levels.

A judge chided Giuliani for giving “preferential treatment” to Fox, apparently to “reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.”

The story goes far past the standard quid pro quo fare of political endorsements for lucrative tax abatements, though there were several of those. Never before or since, really, has a mayor of New York gone as far for a media friend as Rudy did for Rupert, and never before has a media czar gone as far as Murdoch lieutenant Roger Ailes did to repay the debt, even flirting with a crime, according to one lawsuit, quickly settled for millions, just like the ones that drew so much attention in Parliament.

Let’s start in 1996, three years after Murdoch’s New York Post helped make Giuliani mayor with the narrowest win in modern city history. That year, Rupert and Ailes, who’d actually managed Rudy’s unsuccessful mayoral run in 1989, were launching Fox Cable News and they had one rather daunting problem: Time Warner controlled the prime NYC cable franchise, with 1.2 million viewers, including virtually all of Manhattan, where every advertiser who might buy a spot lived or worked. And Time Warner refused to give Fox a channel for its new venture. In those days, Time Warner only had space for 77 channels on the dial, and 30 applicants had lined up before Fox. Richard Aurelio, who ran the NYC cable system for Time Warner, recalls now that he assured Ailes that in a year or so, they would “get more capacity and put you on.” But, says Aurelio, now long retired at age 83, “Murdoch was furious.” A former deputy mayor under John Lindsay, Aurelio says he’d “never seen such a display of raw political power,” branding it “ferocious.”

Records revealed that after Murdoch and Giuliani talked directly about the matter on Oct. 1, their aides had 25 conversations and two meetings in the space of a few weeks. A deputy mayor instantly warned Time Warner about the possibility that their franchise, granted by the city every 15 years, might not be renewed and volunteered to fly anywhere in the country to meet with a Time Warner executive above Aurelio. When Time Warner wouldn’t budge, Giuliani came up with an extraordinary remedy. The city controlled five public-access channels, written into law as alternatives to commercial television, and the mayor decided to give one of them to Fox. In fact, presumably to make it look like this wasn’t something he would just do for Murdoch, he offered another to Mike Bloomberg’s then-fledgling TV network. The Bloomberg News channel actually had its debut one night before a federal judge could stop the deal, but soon the courts blocked this transparently extralegal adventure.

The judge who ruled against Giuliani, Denise Cote, used to work for him in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Her eloquent decision condemned the city’s “improper motives in giving Fox News preferential treatment,” describing it as “special advocacy” to “reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.” Cote accused the city of “linking Time Warner’s decision” about carrying Fox to the city’s pending approval of its merger with Turner Broadcasting, which required a city signoff, and “to Time Warner’s franchise renewal in 1998.” Saying this was “content-based favoritism,” Cote said Giuliani had violated “longstanding First Amendment principles.” Without adopting all of Cote’s findings, a three-judge appeals panel unanimously affirmed her decision in 1997.

But none of this slowed the Rudy-Rupert alliance for one second.

Aurelio retired in 1997 as the head of the city cable system, and Dick Parsons, a former law partner of Giuliani’s who’d actually co-chaired his campaign-finance committee, assumed control of the New York cable franchise. Murdoch began an ad campaign against the extension of the franchise, and Giuliani aides began harassing Time Warner with renewal issues. “Parsons realized the relationship with Giuliani had soured,” Aurelio recalls, “and decided that, in lieu of putting the franchise in jeopardy, he would reconcile with the mayor.”

“I know he talked to Giuliani, and I know they made a deal to bring Fox in on another channel,” Aurelio says. “I hold Parsons responsible for caving in to Giuliani. I thought it was pretty awful. Giuliani was doing Murdoch’s work.” (Parsons did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

In 1995, the year before Rudy went to bat for Rupert, his wife, Donna Hanover, then 45, was hired by Fox’s New York channel as a street reporter, 13 years after she’d last done the job. The next year, while Rudy crusaded for Fox, her Fox New York salary tripled, which, added to her income elsewhere, meant she was earning twice as much as her husband.

By the time Rudy left City Hall at the end of 2001, he was regarded as a member of the extended Murdoch family, and a property primed by 9/11 for a presidential run. Murdoch came to Giuliani’s 2003 wedding to his next wife (he’d actually performed Ailes’ wedding while mayor). When the NYPD’s Bernie Kerik, the chauffeur Giuliani had elevated to commissioner, was nominated by George W. Bush to become homeland security secretary in 2004, none other than Roger Ailes rushed to Kerik and Giuliani’s aid. The married Kerik, a partner in Giuliani’s new security-consulting company, had been swept up in an affair with Judith Regan, a star in the Murdoch book company that published Kerik’s memoir. Kerik and Regan had split by then, and Ailes apparently feared Regan might become an obstacle to all of Kerik and Giuliani’s grand plans, both profitable and political.

According to court papers Regan filed in 2006 and 2007, after she was fired by News Corp., Ailes told Regan in the midst of the 2004 nomination process that “he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, could harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign.” Ailes “advised Regan to lie to, or withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik,” said the complaint. News Corp. quickly paid $10.7 million to settle the case, pushed in part by reports that Regan had taped the conversation. Regan’s allegations suggested that Ailes was actively preparing for Giuliani’s 2008 campaign within weeks of Bush’s reelection in 2004. Kerik is now in a federal prison on charges of lying to the White House and tax violations in part related to his book. But if Regan’s allegations were true, Ailes’ call to her amounted to obstruction of justice, a News Corp. felony committed on this side of the pond.

When Giuliani did chase the presidency, reports in the summer of 2007 indicated that Fox had devoted twice as much airtime to him as to the eventual nominee, John McCain. In a field flush with candidates ideologically compatible with News Corp., Giuliani was still Fox’s favorite son, having merged his interests with Murdoch’s a decade earlier.

Jacob Albert, Bill Kline, Lenina Mortimer and John Surico contributed reporting to this article.
July 21, 2011 1:0pm

August 2, 2007
In Fox News, Giuliani Finds a Friendly Stage
By RUSS BUETTNER, NY TIMES
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Roger Ailes and Rudolph W. Giuliani have been pulling for each other for nearly two decades.

Mr. Ailes was the media consultant to Mr. Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign in 1989. Mr. Giuliani, as mayor, officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when Mr. Ailes’s company, Fox News Channel, was blocked from securing a cable station in the city.

This year, they were tablemates at the White House correspondents dinner, which Mr. Giuliani attended as a guest of Fox’s parent company, the News Corporation.

Now these allies and friends find themselves on largely uncharted political turf. Mr. Giuliani, 63, is a leading Republican candidate for president. Mr. Ailes, 67, is head of Fox News, the pre-eminent media outlet for likely voters in a Republican primary.

Whether their friendship would ever affect coverage — Fox insists that it has not and will not — it is nonetheless the sort of relationship that other campaigns have noted, though none wanted to speak publicly for fear of offending the station.

So far this year, one political journal found, Mr. Giuliani has logged more time on Fox interview programs than any other candidate. Most of the time has been spent with Sean Hannity, an acknowledged admirer of the former mayor, according to the data compiled by the journal, known as The Hotline.

Fox executives say Mr. Giuliani’s appearances have been driven by his news value and by his status as a front-runner, not by his relationship with Mr. Ailes.

“I can’t remember his ever saying anything, one way or the other, about our coverage of the Giuliani campaign,” Brit Hume, the anchor who coordinates much of Fox’s political coverage, said of Mr. Ailes. “And I am under no injunctions, restrictions, encouragements or directions of any kind as to how that campaign should be covered.”

Yet the relationship between Mr. Ailes and Mr. Giuliani is of the sort that led Mr. Ailes to grouse about CNN during the Clinton administration. Rick Kaplan, the president of CNN at the time, and President Clinton were established friends. Mr. Ailes, asserting the cable channel’s coverage of the president was altogether too warm, called it the “Clinton News Network.”

Mr. Ailes declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Mr. Giuliani, whose campaign would not answer specific questions about the relationship.

But aides to both men acknowledge that they have been friends for more than 20 years. After meeting at dinner parties in the 1980s, where they discovered a shared respect for Ronald Reagan, they developed into the kind of friends who lend one another help, trade accolades and attend each other’s weddings.

They grew close enough that when Mr. Ailes was hospitalized in 1998, Mr. Giuliani showed up at his bedside bearing gifts: a book about New York landmarks and an issue of Wine Spectator.

Today they see each other infrequently, according to aides, who said Mr. Ailes did not offer Mr. Giuliani any sort of political advice.

In 2002, Mr. Ailes was criticized for having offered advice to President Bush months before in the form of a note that suggested how to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Critics contended that Mr. Ailes, as a news executive, had crossed a line. Mr. Ailes said he was only expressing his outrage over the attacks on his country.

“I did not give up my American citizenship to take this job,” he said at the time.

For much of his career, Mr. Ailes’s job was to counsel politicians. He worked as the media consultant to three presidents: Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Reagan and the current president’s father, George H. W. Bush.

Few, if any, presidents have taken office with a close friend at the helm of a network news division, said Thomas E. Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard, and author of “Out of Order,” a book about the relationship between the news media and politics. But the value of television appearances to politicians, he said, has never been in doubt.

“It gets to be circular,” Mr. Patterson said. “The more coverage you get, the easier it is to stay up in the polls. You stay up in the polls, you get more coverage. It’s a cycle that the second- and third-tier candidates just tear their hair out about.”

When Mr. Ailes and Mr. Giuliani met, Mr. Giuliani had recently finished a tour as associate attorney general .

“I had found myself at several dinners with Roger, including at his house, and each time we would wind up talking about how much we liked Ronald Reagan, and how much we agreed with his policies,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his book, “Leadership.”

The two joined forces in the 1989 mayoral campaign, when, Mr. Giuliani later said, Mr. Ailes helped him overcome his stiffness in front of cameras so as to “connect with people” rather than launch into a “dissertation.”

“Roger explained that every time a candidate is given a microphone, he’s getting $100,000 worth of publicity,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his book.

After he became mayor, Mr. Giuliani spoke at a reception in 1994 as Mr. Ailes was named president of the new CNBC business news network. Before a crowd in the Rainbow Room, the mayor listed Mr. Ailes’s accomplishments as a producer of comedy specials and documentaries, including the Emmy Award-winning “Television and the Presidency.”

“I am personally gratified to see that Roger has reached a new pinnacle in a remarkable career, because Roger has played an important role in my own career,” Mr. Giuliani said, according to a draft of his speech.

In 1996, when Mr. Ailes and Rupert Murdoch started Fox News, Mr. Giuliani intervened as mayor after Time Warner cable refused to carry the new station in the city. Time Warner, which had 1.1 million subscribers in the city, said it had room for only one more news station, which it had just awarded to MSNBC.

Fox accused Time Warner of trying to protect CNN, which Time Warner was buying. On Sept. 20, 1996, Mr. Ailes called Mr. Giuliani to ask for help. A flurry of meetings followed, but Time Warner did not budge. Three weeks later, the Giuliani administration said it would broadcast Fox News on a municipal-run station, citing the benefits of offering diverse news sources and protecting the 600 jobs Fox had created.

“We looked into it, and the mayor decided, this is something the city had a vested interest in and that we should pursue it, and on that level I agreed with him,” Fran Reiter, a deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani, said in an interview. “I really believe that the mayor believed what Time Warner was doing was wrong.”

But a federal judge blocked his plan, calling it “special advocacy” to “reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.” The companies came to terms the next year.

Time Warner executives found the pressure from Mr. Giuliani “extraordinary,” Richard Aurelio, a former head of Time Warner’s city cable operation, said in an interview. “To have politicians getting into the act of making those judgments was, to me, outrageous,” he said. “Never before had any politician ever done anything of that kind.”

The episode undermined Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Richard D. Parsons, the president of Time Warner, whom Mr. Giuliani had once worked with at a law firm and who had been one of Mr. Giuliani’s few prominent black supporters. A spokesman for Mr. Parsons, now Time Warner’s chairman, said he was not available to be interviewed.

Under Mr. Ailes, Fox News grew to claim the largest audience in cable news. Now he is about to introduce a new channel for the Murdoch empire, focusing on financial news. The acquisition of Dow Jones and its marquee financial brands is part of a Murdoch-Ailes strategy to conquer a new frontier in business news.

Mr. Ailes has at various times been described as tightly controlling coverage, even suggesting particular jokes for his anchors to deliver. But a spokeswoman said his influence had grown more diffuse since he took over several other Fox divisions.

Mr. Hume, managing editor of Fox’s Washington coverage, said Mr. Ailes was involved in meetings to discuss stories, but had never done anything to favor any candidate.

This year through July 15, Mr. Giuliani appeared for 115 minutes in interviews on Fox, according to The Hotline, the political journal. More than half of those minutes, 78, were spent with Mr. Hannity, co-host of the “Hannity & Colmes” talk show. Mr. Hannity, a conservative who has spoken of his admiration for Mr. Giuliani, makes his own decisions about bookings, a spokeswoman said.

Mr. Giuliani’s on-air time on Fox was 25 percent greater than that of his Republican competitor Mitt Romney, and nearly double that of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Fred D. Thompson, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy, came in second to Mr. Giuliani with 101 minutes of Fox interviews.

Aides to Mr. Ailes said he and Mr. Giuliani spoke with and saw each other only infrequently these days, though the two sat together in April at the correspondents’ dinner.

Mr. Ailes attended Mr. Giuliani’s 2003 wedding and was invited to the Yankees’ World Series celebrations at City Hall. Mr. Giuliani sent a personal note to Mr. Ailes when his son was born in 2000; two years earlier, he had presided over Mr. Ailes’s wedding at City Hall.

“Thanks for making our families feel so special,” Mr. Ailes wrote later in a note to Mr. Giuliani. “We appreciate everything you did to make it such a tremendous day, but most of all thank you for your friendship.”

Rudy! An Investigative Biography
By Wayne Barrett, January 2, 2001, Printed on July 25, 2011
LINK

Rudy Guiliani. New York City's Mayor. America's Number One Cop. A municipal superhero who needs no phone booth. A politician of astonishing complexity whose full story has never been told. Until now.

Guiliani has assumed mythic proportions, the can-do emblem of the new urban politics. He has been heralded as the ultimate turn-around artist — projecting himself as the reformer who single-handedly salvaged a crime-ridden and blighted New York. From his days in the Eighties as the Michael Milken-busting U.S. Attorney of Manhattan to his current purge of hundreds of thousands from his city's welfare rolls, Giuliani has targeted rich and poor with the same relentless certitude.

This investigative biography starts with the college kid who confided his presidential dream to his girlfriend and practiced future campaign speeches in front of her at home. It analyzes his substantial impact as US Attorney, badly wounding the Mafia, ransacking the white collared halls of Wall Street and forever changing the face of New York politics. It looks at his celebrated crime reduction and other achievements through a new lens, highlighting the single-mindedness that has made Giuliani one of America's most important and controversial figures. With two marriages as troubled and secretive as his family history, Giuliani is on every New Yorker's therapeutic couch, stirring feelings as intense as the ones that visibly boil inside of him. Though he has become a national legend, his re-election total in 1997 was the lowest in seventy-four years.

Wayne Barrett, co-author of the bestselling City for Sale, draws on twenty years of reporting on Giuliani to bring us Rudy!, the most comprehensive and newsbreaking biography of a man of giant contradictions and unpredictable expectations.