From The New York Times, 11/18/07:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18rich.html?hp
What ‘That Regan Woman’ Knows
By FRANK RICH
NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor,
not as the terminally cheerful “America’s Mayor” cooing to babies in
New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty:
his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before
he got anywhere near the White House.
Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values
enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him
because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged
children.
Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by
his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history.
Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis
Vuitton ’tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the
Rudy orbit.
That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she
was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house,
HarperCollins.
Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray, a silver bullet
aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.
Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer,
claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson “If I
Did It” fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News
Corporation.
But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what’s most
riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70
pages:
“In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told
Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if
disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive
advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from,
investigators concerning Kerik.”
Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and
police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be
President Bush’s short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland
Security.
Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was
indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just
before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit.
Whether Ms. Regan’s charge about that unnamed Murdoch “senior
executive” is true or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the
evidence — her overall message is plain.
She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire.
And she could talk.
Boy, could she!
As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the
tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper.
My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left
me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message
about a column I’d written on one of her authors.
It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown
restaurant some years later.
She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose
post-9/11 autobiography, “The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice,”
was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.
What I didn’t know then was that this married author and single editor
were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too.
Their love nest, we’d later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground
zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers.
Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there.
As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in “The Lost Son” —
published before the revelation of their relationship — there was “one
hero who is missing” from his book’s tribute to “courage and honor”
and “her name is Judith Regan.”
Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik.
Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer
points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or
about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an
assignment he later received in Iraq and botched).
But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr.
Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11.
Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously,
that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the
World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.
Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor
established after leaving office.
Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail
drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his
federal indictment.
That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to
another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.”
Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families
of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani
Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in
Delaware.
He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but
the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable
deductions were bogus.
Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr.
Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners.
Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all.
He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral
briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik’s association with a
company suspected of ties to organized crime.
Ms. Regan’s knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn’t limited to whatever she
learned from Mr. Kerik.
She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the
media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the
impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996.
A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get
the Fox News Channel on the city’s cable boxes and presided over Mr.
Ailes’s wedding.
Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox’s early lineup.
Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, “That Regan
Woman.”
Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to
protect Rudy’s secrets?
Her complaint does not say.
But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of
the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than
any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated “Hannity &
Colmes.”
That show’s co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign
fund-raiser this year.
Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan’s lawsuit last week was minimal.
After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as “a gossip
column story,” and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in
gossip.
The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal,
whose print edition included no mention of the suit’s reference to
that “senior executive” at the News Corporation.
(After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.)
The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial
board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.
During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt
about the Clintons that it put the paper’s brand on an encyclopedic
six-volume anthology titled “A Journal Briefing — Whitewater.”
You’d think the controversies surrounding “America’s Mayor” are at
least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The
Journal investigated back then.
This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the
government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners
clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin.
We’ll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper’s Murdoch era.
But beyond New York’s dailies and The Village Voice, the national news
media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely
covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch’s Fox
News has.
They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani’s checkered family
history than the questions raised by his record in government and
business.
It’s astounding how many are willing to look the other way while
recycling those old 9/11 videos.
One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front
page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his
mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt
foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from
mostly undisclosed donors.
The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners,
copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York’s
municipal archives.
Historians told The Tribune there’s no way to verify that the papers
were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since
signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being
repeated.
Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the
unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton’s papers has received
all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared.
But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be
accelerated, it’s hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up
after six volumes of “Whitewater,” an impeachment trial and the
avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and
now.
The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory.
And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was
fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of
Linda Tripp.
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Harry
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