On every anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is cycled through various talking head “news” formats to recount the events of the fateful day seventeen years ago. Giuliani’s veracity about the events of 9/11 had plenty of doubters just after the attacks. However, given Giuliani’s declaration on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on August 19, 2018 that “truth isn’t truth,” Giuliani’s lies about both the Trump administration and 9/11 should be considered holistically as coming from a corrupt liar.
Giuliani replaced John Dowd, a seasoned Washington attorney, as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in March 2018. Dowd resigned after becoming frustrated over Trump’s constant lying, a bugbear for any attorney attempting to prepare a client for a legal proceeding. In Giuliani, however, Trump discovered a fellow dissembler of the truth.
Giuliani was the perfect mayor of New York to preside over interfering with the largest crime scene in American history, namely, the rubble of the World Trade Center complex. Giuliani’s failure to embrace the truth started much earlier in his government career.
In 2007, Giuliani’s presidential campaign released a television ad about the release of American hostages by Iran on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day – January 20, 1981. In the ad, Giuliani said, “I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages, and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing. The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as president of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t back down. I’m Rudy Giuliani, and I approve this message.”
For those who were investigating the roles of George H. W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates, and others engaged in treasonous negotiations with the Iranian mullahs in 1980 to ensure the hostages remained in Tehran until after the November 1980 election between Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, Giuliani's campaign spot had an unexpected side effect.
A March 16, 1981, memo written by then-unconfirmed Associate Attorney General Giuliani to the Acting Criminal Division chief John Keeney, which was titled "CIA Referral – Alleged Foreign Government Interference With 1980 Presidential Election," suggests that the CIA referred to the Justice Department evidence that there was criminal activity involving a foreign power in the 1980 presidential election. That foreign power was the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That criminal activity became known as the Reagan-Bush campaign's "October Surprise." Keeney and Giuliani agree to draft a letter from Deputy Attorney General Edward C. Schmults to the CIA to ask for a full report on the criminal referral that would be available to Justice personnel on a strict need-to-know basis. The Attorney General at the time of the Giuliani memo was William French Smith. His special assistant to handle – read that as bury – the Reagan-Bush campaign’s pre-election conspiracy with Iran was John G. Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Like Trump, Giuliani, had significant connections to organized crime. Giuliani was hailed as the man who took down the five Mafia crime families in New York, while serving as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Just because Giuliani helped break up the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno families, does not mean he had a clean slate when it came to close ties with organized crime. In 2007, The New York Daily News obtained a copy of a 140-page confidential internal Giuliani-for-President dossier that detailed pitfalls foreseen by the campaign. Giuliani merely sold out the Italian crime families and handed protection by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to Jewish mob bosses like Gideon Chern. This syndicate, based mostly in Brooklyn, is officially referred to as the “Eurasian Mafia” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is unofficially called the “Kosher Nostra” by federal agents and New York police financial crime detectives who have probed the syndicate’s significant connections to the Trump Organization.
The 1980s was the heyday for Trump's connections with the mob. Trump admitted to having mob-controlled construction contractors "pour the concrete" for his various buildings. Trump's Atlantic City casino and sporting operations were also heavily influenced by mobsters. By the end of the 1980s Trump was dealing less with the Gambinos and Genoveses and more with Russian-Jewish mobsters, many of whom had recently arrived in New York from Odessa, Leningrad, Kishniev, Kiev, and Moscow. These were the individuals who were afforded protection by Giuliani when he was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.
As mayor of New York, Giuliani not only presided over the quick removal of World Trade Center debris from the “ground zero” crime scene, but also interfered in an FBI investigation of five Israeli suspects arrested in New Jersey in the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The Israelis, all connected to Israeli intelligence, were believed by the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency to have been connected with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert interceded twice with his good friend Giuliani to have the Israelis released from detention. It mattered not to Giuliani that the five Israelis were of “high interest” to the government’s terrorism investigation and that they were housed in one of the most highly restrictive prison settings possible, the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit (“ADMAX SHU”) of the Metropolitan Detention Center (“MDC”) in Brooklyn. During their first two weeks of detention, the FBI prohibited the Israeli Consul-General in New York from meeting with the Israelis. Prayer books and a bible given to the Israelis by a rabbi were inspected by FBI agents and prison guards for coded messages. Yet, amid all this U.S. intelligence interest in the Israelis, Giuliani took it upon himself to negotiate with Olmert their eventual exfiltration to Israel.
After 9/11, Giuliani could not speak a single sentence without mentioning 9/11 in some context. After stepping down as mayor of New York and becoming a chief of the Bracewell & Giuliani law firm, Giuliani discovered there was good money in grifting donations meant for the families of victims of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Giuliani became the trustee for the Twin Towers Fund, established to accept philanthropic donations for the families of New York and New York-New Jersey police, fire fighters, and emergency medical workers killed in the 9/11 attacks. Rather than maintain the money in a risk-free account, Giuliani invested much of it in his three favorite companies: Halliburton, General Electric, and the insurance firm Conseco, which came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2003 after being bailed out by GE Capital, a subsidiary of General Electric. Unfortunately for Giuliani, the New York firefighters, who were subjected to insults and pay and benefit cuts from Giuliani as mayor, caught wind of Giuliani's gambling with their money on the stock market.
Upon becoming Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani took a leave of absence from another dodgy law firm, Greenberg-Traurig. The firm had been where convicted Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff once hung his shingle.
On every September 11 anniversary, Giuliani falls into his tedious 9/11 refrain as the besieged “America’s mayor.” After Giuliani spits out “9/11,” just append it with his other comment, “truth isn’t truth.”
