Today’s Must ReadCourtesy of the Rudy Giuliani camp’s efforts to spin the shag fund story, this is another installment in Great Moments in Damage Control! (from The New York Daily News):
Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor in Giuliani’s City Hall, told the Daily News Wednesday night that the administration’s practice of allocating security expenses to small city offices that had nothing to do with mayoral protection has “gone on for years” and “predates Giuliani.”When told budget officials from the administrations of Ed Koch and David Dinkins said they did no such thing, Lhota caved Thursday, “I’m going to reverse myself on that. I’m just going to talk about the Giuliani era,” Lhota said. “I should only talk about what I know about.”…
“I don’t understand when it started. I don’t understand why it started,” Lhota said. “But I do know one thing: It was consistently done … in no way shape or form did it imply a coverup.”
The “no explanation” explanation seems to be the best spin the Giuliani camp has available.
Other than that, there’s 1) the irrelevant focus on whether the NYPD reimbursed the backwater city agencies which originally were billed for the tryst costs — a response that has only served to highlight that Giuliani is dodging the main issue, or 2) the fact that, in order to keep the mayor’s budget artificially low, there seems to have been a policy of misallocation in his administration, of which the trips to Judith Nathan’s Southampton condo were only a small part (though for some reason we haven’t seen them try this line yet).
So “I don’t understand when it started, I don’t understand why it started” it is!