Bernie Kerik started from humble beginnings, but he rose to the top at a remarkable speed. His mother, he revealed in his autobiography, was a prostitute, but he went into law enforcement. Once he became friends with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, things happened fast: In less than a decade, he went from being an undercover detective to the city's correction commissioner and then the head of its police department.
The fall happened just as fast.
It began at the end of 2004, when then-President George W. Bush named Kerik as his choice to head the Department of Homeland Security. Questions about some of his dealings led to the nomination being withdrawn, but it was too late to save him.
On Thurday, Kerik plead guilty to federal charges that stemmed from the nomination, which included lying to the Bush administration about his relationship with contractors who worked for the city and renovated his apartment. He's also expected to admit to his guilt on tax charges. Prosecutors have recommended 27 to 33 months in prison, but a judge could decide to sentence him to more than that -- the maximum is 61 years.
The plea came after Kerik, who'd originally planned a vigorous defense, had his bail revoked and was sent to jail a little more than two weeks ago. During that time, there were reportedly serious concerns about his mental state and he spent 10 days in a psychiatric unit.
The Senate voted Tuesday in favor of a measure, already approved by the House, that allows the administration to continue transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. for trial. President Obama is expected to sign the bill.
There is one big restriction included in the legislation: The detainees may not allowed to be brought to the U.S. if it the transfer is done for the purpose of releasing them. Despite warnings from people who oppose the idea of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo, the administration is also against the concept of releasing former detainees here.
Congress may not have the last word on this, however. Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will ask the justices to decide whether detainees who are not considered a security risk can be freed in the U.S. The case was brought by 13 Chinese Muslims who were cleared for release six years ago but are still imprisoned at Guantanamo.
Once, Bernie Kerik was the commissioner of the New York City Police Department; later, he was -- briefly -- then-President George W. Bush's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security. Now, he can't even stay out of jail before going on trial.
Kerik's facing corruption and fraud charges, and is scheduled to go on trial next week. But at a hearing on Tuesday, Judge Stephen Robinson revoked Kerik's bail and sent him to jail. The New York Post points out that Kerik is likely to be housed in a facility that's right next to the headquarters where he presided over the NYPD not even 10 years ago.
Robinson revoked Kerik's bail because the former commissioner leaked non-public information to people associated with his defense; that information then showed up on Web sites that support him, potentially tainting the jury pool.
The judge was clearly frustrated with the defendant who appeared before him.
"I fear he has a toxic combination: self-minded focus and arrogance," Robinson said. "He sees the court's ruling as an inconvenience, something to be ignored, and an obstacle to be circumvented."
Think your day is going badly? Could be worse -- you could be one of President Obama's high-level nominees.
Earlier today, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to become secretary of Health and Human Services due to problems with his taxes. Daschle's withdrawal came just a short time after Nancy Killefer, Obama's selection to be chief performance officer, wrote a letter to the president withdrawing herself from consideration because of tax problems as well. And they're just following New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who dropped out of consideration to be Commerce secretary because of a federal investigation into possible pay-for-play.
Obviously, none of these withdrawals have reflected favorably on either the new Obama administration or the administration's vetting process. But this is hardly the first time in recent history a president has faced some problems with his cabinet appointments.
In 2000, George W. Bush's nominee for Labor secretary, Linda Chavez, had to withdraw when it was discovered that she had given haven to illegal immigrants. Bush suffered further embarrassment in 2004 when Bernard Kerik withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Homeland Security due to a variety of financial and ethical concerns.
In 1993, Bill Clinton had an especially difficult time finding an attorney general who hadn't hired an illegal immigrant to be her nanny. Zoë Baird, the first woman Clinton nominated to be attorney general, withdrew because of the immigration status of her babysitter. Second choice Kimba Wood withdrew for the same reason. Clinton also withdrew the nomination of his choice for assistant attorney general, Lani Guinier, because he deemed her views on the empowerment of African Americans too radical.
It's never a good sign when you've got disgraced and indicted friends vouching for you -- welcome back, Bernie Kerik! -- but maybe that's the best Rudy Giuliani can do just now.
The Politico broke the news Wednesday that obscure city offices in New York were billed for the cost of security when then Mayor Giuliani visited then mistress Judith Nathan in the Hamptons. Since then, Giuliani and his supporters have offered a series of explanations -- one unsupported, one already abandoned and none particularly satisfying.
Or, as the front of the New York Daily News says today: "Doesn't Add Up!"
Let's run through the math.
Explanation No. 1: No explanation whatsoever. When the Politico explained the charges it would be making to a Giuliani spokeswoman before the story appeared, the spokeswoman declined to comment at all.
Explanation No. 2: "It's not true." At the GOP presidential debate Wednesday night, Anderson Cooper asked Giuliani whether, as mayor, "you took trips to the Hamptons and expensed the costs of your police detail to obscure city offices." "First of all, it's not true," Giuliani said. Then, after saying that he needed security because he was the subject of threats, Giuliani said that the security teams "put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them. I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately." Giuliani hasn't explained what wasn't "true" about the story, and in fact, no one is disputing the basic allegation: that the security expenses were billed to obscure city agencies rather than to the NYPD.
Explanation No. 3: It's a "hit job." After the GOP debate, Giuliani speculated that the Politico piece might be the handiwork of one of the other presidential campaigns -- but only a Democratic campaign, of course. "I would not accuse any of my opponents of doing it," he said. "But who knows, it could be on the Democratic side." If Giuliani had any evidence that a rival campaign was behind the story, he didn't offer it.
Explanation No. 4: Everybody does it like this. Shortly after the Politico story broke, Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, told the Daily News that the practice of billing obscure city offices for mayoral security has "gone on for years" and "predates Giuliani." When told Thursday that spokesmen for Giuliani's predecessors disagreed, Lhota said he needed to "reverse" himself. "I'm just going to talk about the Giuliani era," he said. "I should only talk about what I know about."
Explanation No. 5: Whatever it was, it wasn't a coverup: Having abandoned his "everybody does it" defense, Lhota told the Daily News Thursday: "I don't understand when it started. I don't understand why it started. But I do know one thing: It was consistently done ... in no way shape or form did it imply a coverup." But as the New York Times has reported, when a city auditor started asking questions about $34,000 in security-travel expenses he found in the city's Loft Board's ledgers in 2001, Giuliani's office "refused" to answer, citing "security" concerns.
Explanation No. 6: We were helping the cops. On Thursday -- the same day he told the Daily News that he didn't "understand why it started" -- Lohta told the Associated Press that the security expenses were paid out of offices tied to City Hall rather than by the NYPD itself because the NYPD took too long to reimburse the poor police officers assigned to Giuliani's detail. At the end of each year, Lohta said, the NYPD would reimburse the various city agencies that had been stuck with the tab in the meantime. But even if that's true, it doesn't explain why the costs were distributed among random city offices rather than paid out of a single budget account, which is how city comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. tells the Times it should have been done.
Maybe it isn't fair to hang Rudy Giuliani with all of the sins of Bernard Kerik, who surrendered to law enforcement officials this morning after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of mail and wire fraud, tax fraud, making false statements on a bank application, making false statements for a U.S. government position and theft of honest services.
Yeah, so maybe Giuliani's "loyalty" to Kerik caused him to miss the "warning signs" he was shown. And yeah, maybe Giuliani has changed his story about what he knew about Kerik when. But Giuliani has sort of admitted that he erred in not vetting Kerik more thoroughly before naming him police commissioner in New York and pushing George W. Bush to nominate him as the director of the Department of Homeland Security.
And yeah, so maybe Giuliani has also made it clear that he thinks his appointment of Kerik was, on balance, the right decision anyway -- he got results, you know? --- but that's all ancient history. After all, Giuliani appointed Kerik police commissioner in 2000, which was a whole year before 9/11, which is when everything changed, right?
Right.
But now that we're living in a post-9/11 world and Giuliani is running for president, wouldn't it be appropriate to ask whether Giuliani would recuse himself from any involvement in Kerik's case?
Apparently not. The New York Daily News asked Guiliani Thursday whether he'd consider pardoning Kerik if he's elected and Kerik's convicted. Giuliani's answer: "It wouldn't be fair to ask that question at this point."
When Rudolph Giuliani delivered his stark warning Tuesday of another 9/11 should the Republicans lose the White House in 2008, Democratic presidential candidates responded with a predictable chorus of outrage. Even the amiable Barack Obama protested that he had sunk to a "new low in the politics of fear."
But in truth, Democrats ought to be happy whenever the Republican front-runner opens his mouth. For every time the former New York mayor speaks, and especially when he reaches for demagogy, he confirms again that electing him would mean prolonging the disaster of the Bush administration, or precisely the opposite of what most Americans say they want now.
Ever since his prime-time speech during the Republican Convention of 2004, if not earlier, Giuliani has been locked into the "wartime presidency" script written by Karl Rove to win the midterm elections and reelect George W. Bush. That divisive script purposely ignored the patriotic solidarity that had unified the nation in the aftermath of 9/11. Rove insisted that only Republicans could be trusted to protect America in the "long war" against the terrorists, implying that for the duration of the war only Republicans should exercise power. The logic of Giuliani's speech was impeccably Rovian.
"I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," he told the rapt fat cats at the Lincoln Day dinner Tuesday in Rockingham, N.H. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation, and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.
"If any Republican is elected president -- and I think obviously I would be the best at this -- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it," he said.
Yet despite Giuliani's customary swaggering and braying and the bellowing cheers he elicited from the audience, that speech marks a rhetorical dead end for him and his party. He should be challenged to explain and expand his remarks. Does he truly favor an open-ended commitment of American troops in Iraq? Does he support unlimited surveillance of Americans by their government? Would he countenance torture as a form of interrogation? Even his fellow war enthusiast John McCain drew the line there. The Iraq escalation isn't working, the war remains deeply unpopular, and the majority of the public long ago stopped believing the lies used to justify Bush administration policy. Blustering about white flags will stir up Republican primary voters, but those partisan insults also slur the majority of Americans who want to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq.
Giuliani's endorsement of the strategic disasters in Iraq and Guantánamo raises serious questions about his judgment. His broader assertions about the war on terrorism, such as the infallibility of his leadership and the overall supremacy of Republicans, simply won't withstand scrutiny. Having entwined himself so inextricably with Bush, he will have to answer for the president's failures as well as his own, both before and after 9/11 -- the tragedy that provides the only conceivable rationale for his candidacy.
It is not true, as Giuliani claimed in New Hampshire, that nobody understood the threat posed by al-Qaida before September 2001. The Clinton administration mobilized against the millennium plot in the months before December 1999, thwarted more than one al-Qaida conspiracy and spent billions of dollars on counterterrorist planning and programs. When Bill Clinton departed, he and his staff tried to warn President Bush and the incoming national security team to take the jihadists seriously, and were contemptuously ignored.
The new Republican administration disregarded many warnings, in fact, and neglected the threat until it was too late. That is a matter of public record.
As for Giuliani himself, there is no evidence that he had any special understanding of terror, even after the first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred during the same year he won New York's mayoral election. There is considerable evidence, however, that his subsequent decisions as mayor made the terrible situation on 9/11 even worse. Sooner or later, both Giuliani and his supporters will have to face that evidence, compiled by reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins in "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," their recent book that dismantled the mythology of "America's Mayor."
In vivid detail, Barrett and Collins examine how Giuliani brushed aside the advice of real experts and stubbornly built the city's new emergency command center in a World Trade Center building, although terrorists had struck there already and were believed likely to strike again. When that multimillion-dollar boondoggle fell with the rest of ground zero, the mayor and his aides were left to run the fire and police response from the streets, with mixed success at best. The location of the command center was only one of several ultimately lethal errors that originated in Giuliani's City Hall.
More recently he made another horrific mistake by promoting the appointment of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security. Fortunately, that nomination was promptly killed after New York newspapers began to investigate Kerik's background. It was bad enough that Giuliani had elevated the thuggish police bodyguard, first to corrections commissioner and then to police commissioner, over far more qualified candidates strictly because he was a sycophantic loyalist. He was dead wrong about Kerik -- whose bad character and poor judgment included accepting favors from a Mob-connected contractor -- and almost placed the man in one of the government's most sensitive and important positions.
Of course, the Kerik nomination exemplifies the Bush model of crony government. (If only he had been around the White House for a few weeks longer, the crooked cop might even have earned a nickname, like Brownie or Fredo or Turd Blossom.) Giuliani's fervent recommendation of Kerik demonstrated that, like Bush, he values cronyism far more than merit and the public interest.
No doubt the former mayor believes that he is "obviously" the best choice for president. And no doubt he is -- but only for the diminishing minority of voters who still want more of the same.
Giuliani out, and maybe in, in 2010.
