A Grilling

Tim Russert worked over Rudy Giuliani today in the most merciless fashion, leaving the candidate at a loss to explain security protections for then girlfriend Judith Nathan and struggling as well to justify his decision not to release the client list for Giuliani Partners.

On disclosing his clients ...

RUSSERT: Why not just sever ties and put out a list of all your clients?

GIULIANI: Well, first of all, I, I, I couldn’t do that. I mean, I couldn’t put out a list of all my clients. There are confidentiality agreements that surround the relationship that businesses have with law firms, in particular, in some cases with security firms. So I can’t do that. All, all I can tell you is the following: I can tell you that every client of GP of any significance while I was there, while I was involved in the day-to-day, day-to-day operations of it has been discussed, significant number of the Bracewell, Giuliani clients have been discussed, and the reality is that none of them amount to anything other than ethical, lawful, decent work done by both companies, sometimes of the highest standards, always ethical and decent. And none of them involve any kind of conflict of any kind. And as we go along, we’ll explore more of it.

On appointing Bernard Kerik ...

GIULIANI: Well, look, I’ve, I’ve recommended and appointed thousands of people over the years. So I think the way you find out is my judgment generally very good and sometimes bad, like any other human being is, what kind of results have I gotten with the people that I appointed? How, how could I have mostly bad judgment about people and have reduced crime in New York by 60 percent? How can I, how can I not have pretty good judgment about the people who work for me and not been able to turn around the United States attorney’s office or do the turnaround of New York City or be successful in, in business? So the reality is—and I, I write about this in my book—I know my judgment is not going to be 100 percent correct. You try to get to 100 percent. It’s been correct enough so that I’ve had a great deal of success, I’ve been able to deal with crises very effectively, and I’ve been able to turn things around that other people haven’t been able to turn around. It doesn’t mean that I can’t make—as one of my predecessors, Fiorello LaGuardia, used to say, he used to say, “I don’t make many mistakes, but when I make them, they’re big ones.”

And about his now wife ...

RUSSERT: But this, this was when, this was when no one knew she was your girlfriend. This was before September 11th, 2001. There were—no one knew who she was.

GIULIANI: They were—well, first of all, that isn’t correct. Secondly, these were all based upon threat assessments made by the New York City Police Department and all based on their analysis of what was necessary to protect her life, my life, other people’s lives.

RUSSERT: Before it was known that you were even dating her, there were threats against her?

GIULIANI: The threats were—the threats were after. The threats were after.

(JENNIFER SKALKA)