Team Rudy Stonewalled on Shag Fund as Early as 2001In comments to the Politico yesterday, Anthony Carbonetti, a longtime aide to Rudy Giuliani and his chief of staff when he was mayor, told Ben Smith that this was the first he’d heard that the city comptroller had been asking about the mayor’s charges to backwater agencies.
So we asked the city comptroller’s office. And spokesman Jeff Simmons told us that the audit, which focused on $34,000 of travel charges to one of those obscure agencies, the New York City Loft Board, had indeed begun in 2001, when Rudy was still mayor. The comptroller had made “repeated requests to the Loft Board and Mayor’s Office for further information and was stonewalled,” he said.
Of course, that stonewalling has continued in the Bloomberg administration, which has refused to discuss the charges, citing “security,” although they did refer the matter to the city Department of Investigations, where it seems to have disappeared.