Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Rudy with his pal and supporter Sean Hannity on Fox News, the network
run by Roger Ailes -- who is also an advisor to ... Rudy's campaign

They say you're known by the company you keep. Here's a bit of the company Rudy Giuliani has been keeping:

1. "Vulture" capitalists:

As ABC News' Brian Ross reports, leaders of the Congo are blasting a key financial backer of the Giuliani presidential campaign for his rape of African economies.

The African Republic of Congo has launched a lobbying and PR blitz in Washington, D.C., targeting "vulture" investors who buy up third-world debt cheaply and then apply legal muscle to force them to pay, according to the Washington, D.C. newspaper The Hill.

One such investor is Paul Singer, they say, whose $8 billion hedge fund controls an investment group which owns $118 million in Congolese debt -- and wants to collect.

Singer and his employees have given more than $180,000 to Giuliani's campaign this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. And as chairman of Giuliani's fundraising in the Northeast, Singer has helped raise over $10 million for the former New York mayor's presidential bid, the paper reported in September.

More on Singer in this previous post.

2. Pedophile priests:

ABC News has been hitting it out of the park, and this time they've dropped the bomb on Giuliani's latest hire for his disreputable consulting firm (which he's still working for, despite a pledge to walk away to avoid conflicts of interest during his campaign): a defrocked priest accused of molesting teenage boys. The former priest, Alan Placa (pictured with Rudy and his mistress third wife Judith here, was the best man at Rudy's marriage to his first cousin, and performed Rudy's second marriage, to Donna Hanover (the woman Rudy later dumped via TV press conference so he could marry the mistress.) Wonder if Tim Russert will ever get all red faced and ask Rudy about Placa in a presidential debate...?

3. Hugo Chavez

Through another of his business interests, Bracewell & Giuliani, Rudy has been a paid lobbyist for Citgo Petroleum Corp., the oil and gas company that's wholly owned by the government of Venezuela, which is of course, run by dictator in training Hugo Chavez. (Note to Dick Cheney, Chavez hasn't gotten around to running Peru...)

4. Bernard Kerik

The Giuliani campaign would like you to forge about Bernard Kerik, Rudy's longtime pal (whom Rudy tried to get installed as Homeland Security secretary back int he day.) But Rudy-Bernie is the relationship that just won't go away, as the NYTimes reminds us in a 3,000 word article today (print version here).

Rudy is officially no longer standing by his crimie friend, former New York police chief Bernard Kerik, ... but he definitely is keeping an eye on him. From a recent story in the New York Post:

October 22, 2007 -- Rudy Giuliani's law partner has been told to monitor the criminal probe of disgraced ex-NYPD boss Bernard Kerik, which threatens to muddy up the former mayor's bid to become president.

As part of his sensitive assignment, Marc Mukasey has thwarted Kerik's lawyer from interviewing witnesses who might help his defense, sources told The Post yesterday.

5. Michael Mukasey

The probable next attorney general of the United States, who like Rudy is ambivalent on torture (no, actually not like Rudy. Rudy is pretty definitely pro-torture...) is an old Giuliani pal. From the same New York Post article:

Mukasey is the son of former federal Judge Michael Mukasey, a longtime Giuliani friend nominated by President Bush to become the next U.S. attorney general. Michael Mukasey is awaiting Senate confirmation.

Marc Mukasey's task to keep an eye on Kerik's criminal investigation shows Giuliani's concern with how the legal fate of his former NYPD and correction commissioner could affect his presidential campaign, sources said.

A source familiar with the Kerik probe said Mukasey's role in monitoring the Kerik case is "obviously trying to distance Giuliani from all [the allegations about Kerik], although obviously it all occurred on Giuliani's watch."

And the refusal to make witnesses linked to Giuliani and his consulting firm available to Kerik's lawyer underscores the frayed relationship between the once-close friends. Those witnesses are people who have spoken to prosecutors and a grand jury investigating Kerik.

"Once there was this sense [in the Giuliani camp] of 'Bernie's a great guy,' even after he became embroiled in scandal," a source said. "Now, Mukasey's taking a different approach with him."

6. The Neocons

Rudy is being advised by the same cadre of crackpot neocons who bedazzled George W. Bush, including neocon don Norman Podhoretz, who today, is probably somewhere praying to God for a U.S. war with Iran. Even some right wingers are raising the alarm on Rudy's neoconservative leanings, which appear to be deep:

...what's left of the neocon movement does seem to be converging around the Giuliani campaign, to some degree, because he embraces their common themes: a willingness to use military power, a tendency to group all radical Islamist groups together as a common enemy, strong support for Israel and an aggressive posture toward Iran. "He's positioning himself as the neo-neocon," jokes Richard Holbrooke, a top foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. (He's argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was not the moral offense it's been portrayed as, though he doesn't say Muslims should suffer the same.)

Some traditional conservatives are wary of the Giuliani team. "Clearly it is a rather one-sided group of people," says Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank. "Their foreign-policy manifesto seems to be 'We're right, we're powerful, and just make my day.' He's out-Bushing Bush." ...

7. Roger Ailes


Roger Ailes used to make a living as an advisor to Republican politicians, including candidates named Nixon, Reagan and Bush, but theoretically, he is now busy being a "news man," running the "news" network he founded -- the Fox "News" Channel. He and Rudy have been friends for decades, with Rudy having presided over Ailes' wedding (not to a cousin, or to my knowledge, to a mistress...) and Giuliani is the name of another former candidate that Ailes has advised. So far, Rudy has benefited from the friendship with more face time on Fox than any other candidate.


8. NAFTA truckers

Among Rudy's questionable business ventures is his law firm Bracewell & Giuliani's exclusive deal to represent a company called Cintra, the Spanish firm providing the financial backing to build party of the infamous NAFTA superhighway.

9. Race baiters

Giuliani's media team (the official part, not Roger Ailes,) includes the consulting firm Scott Howell & Company -- the same folks who made the race-baiting "Call me!" ad against African-American Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee. This one's a no-brainer for Rudy, who has, shall we say, issues with Black people.

and last but not least...

10. Dick Cheney

Asked recently what he'd look for in a vice president, Rudy had an especially disturbing answer:

I would want a vice president who was a partner. Someone who was in on everything that was going on, so that that person could take over if, God forbid, something happened. […]

How do you pick a vice president? … I think Vice President Cheney and President Bush’s pick of Vice President Cheney is a good example of picking someone who is qualified to be president of the United States. That is number one — it’s paramount.

Memo to Rudy: Dubya didn't pick Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney did.