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The Qatar government in the mid-1990s invited al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his family to live in Qatar, the 9/11 commission found. Mr. Mohammed was given a job at the Qatar Ministry of Electricity and Water. At the time, Mr. Mohammed was under indictment in the Southern District of New York for his role in a plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners. He was also wanted for questioning in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1996, FBI agents arrived in Qatar to arrest Mr. Mohammed. But the Qataris resisted handing him over, and Mr. Mohammed...

Giuliani stammered his way through a defense of tax dollars spent on a security detail for his girlfriend when he was New York's married mayor. "There were threats; they had to be responded to," Giuliani told NBC's "Meet the Press"....."Judith didn't particularly want it, but it was done because they took the view that it was serious and it had to be done this way." Giuliani has been dogged about how much his extramarital affair cost the city.

DES MOINES, Iowa, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- A lackluster couple of weeks on the campaign trail has taken a toll on Rudy Giuliani's bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The former New York mayor has slipped in the polls as GOP rivals Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have taken up much of the media spotlight in early voting states such as Iowa, The Boston Globe reported Sunday. All the while, Giuliani is focusing on later-voting states, including California and Oklahoma, which both of which will hold primaries Feb. 5, known as Super Tuesday. Recent polls show Giuliani in third in...

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Giuliani tried to ride out new questions over taxpayer-funded chauffeur police services witnesses said were provided to Judith Nathan well before the married mayor revealed his extramarital involvement in 2000..... asked about Nathan's city-funded wheels, Giuliani non-answered "Thank you," and "Have a good night." Nathan's police escorts were thought to have begun in December 2000, after Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said she was threatened and needed around-the-clock protection. (Giuliani hid security detail and travel expenses for Nathan in obscure city agencies.) "If Nathan was provided police protection prior to their being a security-threat assessment, it probably was an illegal use...

WASHINGTON -- Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Sunday defended the expenses incurred by his security detail as he was beginning an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan, saying police made the decision after she received threats. Giuliani in recent weeks has faced a barrage of questions about New York police security costs for his trysts with Nathan and about his business clients, which have included the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. Although a U.S. ally, Qatar is accused of sheltering suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Smiling broadly and laughing at some of the tougher questions...

It's not easy keeping track of Rudy Giuliani's shag-related expenditures of taxpayer money while mayor of New York. For one thing, it's impossible to get a total of the amount spent guarding the mayor's then-girlfriend. And the available records are spotty at best. But we gave it the ol' TPM try. So here, without further ado, is our timeline. 5/99 -- Judith Nathan and Giuliani meet at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on the Upper East Side. 7/3/99 -- NYPD Officers charge the city for gas to "accompany the mayor to Southampton." 7/31/99 -- Four officers accompanying Giuliani stay at...

Giuliani Profile: DOB: May 28, 1944 Occupations: * Founder of Giuliani Partners, a security consulting firm * Mayor of New York City (1994-2001) * U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, appointed 1983 * Associate Attorney General, appointed 1981 Party Affiliation: Republican Spouse: Judith Nathan Giuliani Education: Manhattan College, 1965 JD, Magna Cum Laude, New York University Law School, 1968 "This is an industry that is profiting from the suffering of innocent people. What's worse, its profits rest on a number of illegal and immoral practices. This [firearms industry] lawsuit is meant to end the free pass that...

Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed - even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News. "It went on for months before the affair was public," said Lee Degenstein, 52, a retired Smith Barney vice president who formerly lived at 200 E. 94th St., Nathan's old building. "It was going on longer than anybody thought," added Degenstein, who, along with others in the neighborhood, said they often saw Nathan hopping into unmarked NYPD cars in early 2000, before the affair was revealed that May.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has taken the lead in South Carolina’s Republican Presidential Primary. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows Huckabee with 25% of the vote, Mitt Romney with 18% and Fred Thompson with 18%. A month ago, Romney and Thompson were on top. The latest election poll also shows Rudy Giuliani with 12% of the vote, John McCain with 9%, and Ron Paul with 4% (see crosstabs). The race among Democrats in South Carolina has become a toss-up between Clinton and Obama. Huckabee, at least for the moment, is carrying out the plan envisioned by the Thompson...

Presidential Candidate Giuliani's Partner Linked to Bribery Case When Hank Asher reached into the bag and pulled out the two $15,000 gold Cartier watches, the holiday crowd at Carmine's restaurant on 44th Street in Manhattan noticed, patrons recalled. Later, so did the U.S. attorney in Orange County, Calif., and soon yet another of Rudy Giuliani's business partners was embroiled in a bribery case. Asher, identified by the initials H.A. in Overt Act 59 of a federal grand jury indictment against Orange County sheriff Michael Carona, had handed the diamond-encrusted Cartier baubles to the wives of the sheriff and his deputy,...

Suzanne Citere’s father danced with Hillary Rodham Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, but now, Citere, a 40-year-old dance instructor, is the former first lady’s worst nightmare. Citere sat beaming proudly in the front row last week as Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani, widely considered the frontrunner for his party’s presidential nomination, as Clinton is for hers, delivered a rousing stump speech in a crowded hotel ballroom here in the part of Florida nicknamed “New York’s sixth borough.” “I saw what he did in New York City,” said Citere, a native of Brooklyn who recently changed her party registration from...

The day-to-day operations of Rudy Giuliani's consulting company have been formally turned over to one of the candidate's longtime advisers - and the former mayor hasn't been to his office in more than a month..........."My role is chairman of Giuliani Partners," said Peter Powers, deputy mayor under Giuliani and a friend since childhood. "I run the company on a day-to-day basis; Rudy's role is none........He has an equity interest in the in the firm, but he is not involved in the management of the firm. He is not involved in any clients."

the current round of Huck-a-mania is nothing more that Mike Huckabee’s fifteen minutes of fame, the former Arkansas Governor is certainly making the most of it. Today, in the first full round of national polling completed since last week’s “debate” among Republican Presidential hopefuls, Huckabee has pulled to within three points of the frontrunning Rudy Giuliani. Heading into the debate, Giuliani led Huckabee by twelve. Not only that, new polling data released today shows that Huckabee has pulled to within a single percentage point of Hillary Clinton in a general election match-up. Huckabee is also a frontrunner in Iowa and...

The patron saint of scandal, one William Jefferson Clinton, gives hope to all politicians on the hot seat. Borrowing a page from Friedrich Nietzsche, Bubba is said to counsel those under fire that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." So Rudy Giuliani can take heart from an unlikely bedfellow. Well, maybe not so unlikely, given that Giuliani's current problem stems from the same sort of fix that almost got Clinton booted from the White House. There's no report of a stained blue dress in Giuliani's past, but skeletons from his randy ways are suddenly tumbling out of the closet...

n the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime. Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals. (snip) The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani,...

TALKING POINTS MEMO is swimming in credit card receipts from Rudy Giuliani's administration; one thing in particular has struck us: in 2001, apparently with an eye to future globetrotting, Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though the amount was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against Giuliani's future travel, and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail. The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting...

BLUFFTON, S.C. (AP) -- Republican White House hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday he wouldn't try to change laws that make citizens of children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants, noting that it's a matter determined by the Constitution. "That's a very delicate balance that's been arrived at, and I wouldn't change that," Giuliani said in response to a question while campaigning at Sun City Hilton Head, a sprawling retirement community down the South Carolina coast from Charleston.

In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views. Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.”...

A partnership Rudy Giuliani forged with a wealthy diamond-trading family from Israel helped his effort to expand his fledgling consulting business in Japan, and generated more than $600,000 in speaking fees for the Republican presidential candidate. The former New York mayor's previously undisclosed relationship with the Sage Capital Growth -- a medium-size private equity firm associated with the diamond-trading Steinmetz family of Israel -- shows how money came his way after he earned international acclaim leading the city through the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It offers a peek at Mr. Giuliani's closely held five-year-old consulting business, New York-based Giuliani...