The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them.
-- MachiavelliTrump has added Giuliani to his legal team. He has recently aired more truth about Giuliani than he intended.
Jonathan Lemire and Jill Colvin at AP:
For weeks, President Donald Trump had grown increasingly frustrated with the cable news chatter that he couldn’t hire a big-name attorney for his legal team.
But the president boasted to a confidant this week that he had struck a deal that he believed would silence those critics: He was hiring “America’s F---ing Mayor.”Trump also had this retweet:
"@michelleneuf: @realDonaldTrump We need you and Giuliani in Whitehouse. We need a crime fighter who knows crime!!! And your creativity."— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2014
Um, yes, he was America's [expletive deleted] mayor and he certainly knows crime.
In 2007, Jonathan Stein reported at Mother Jones:
This Giuliani scandal keeps getting better and better. First Politico found that when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, he billed the costs of his extramarital love trysts with Judith Nathan, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, to obscure city agencies. It was also shown that Giuliani billed his 2000 campaign expenses and his then-wife Donna Hanover’s travel expenses to the same obscure agencies. The Giuliani campaign has had a hell of a time explaining the mayor’s actions.In 2007, Michael Powell of NYT reported:
If the rise of Bernard B. Kerik under the mentorship of Rudolph W. Giuliani was meteoric, the speed of his fall was breathtaking.
In December 2004, President Bush nominated Mr. Kerik, a former New York police commissioner, to head the federal Department of Homeland Security. Seven days later, Mr. Kerik withdrew as a nominee.
A cascade of questions followed about his judgment as a public official, not least that he had inappropriately lobbied city officials on behalf of Interstate Industrial, a construction firm suspected of links to organized crime. Mr. Giuliani defended Mr. Kerik, a friend and business partner, whom he had recommended to the Bush administration. But he also tried to shield himself from accusations that he had ignored Mr. Kerik’s failings.
“I was not informed of it,” Mr. Giuliani said then, when asked if he had been warned about Mr. Kerik’s relationship with Interstate before appointing him to the police post in 2000.
Mr. Giuliani amended that statement last year in testimony to a state grand jury. He acknowledged that the city investigations commissioner, Edward J. Kuriansky, had told him that he had been briefed at least once. The former mayor said, though, that neither he nor any of his aides could recall being briefed about Mr. Kerik’s involvement with the company.
