Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani stopped in Sopranos Pizza In Nashua, N.H. during a weekend swing through the state. (Reuters).
After the federal government indicted Rudy Giuliani's former police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, on 16 counts earlier this month, there was a surprising quiet from Giuliani's chief rivals for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor lamented Kerik's alleged misbehavior, but did not directly attack Giuliani's role in advancing Kerik, his former chauffeur, and later recommending him as the country's homeland security adviser.
That changed today, when Romney cited Giuliani's judgment in promoting Kerik during a stop with some of his family members at a toy store here. Romney professed shock that Giuliani had started attacking him for his nomination of a Massachusetts judge who has come under fire for overly lenient treatment of a defendant who has since been accused of killing two people in Washington state. Romney said this was brazen hypocrisy coming from the man who nearly helped make Bernie Kerik a Cabinet secretary.
"I must admit that of all the people who might attack someone on the basis of an appointment he would be the last," Romney said "The idea that Mayor Giuliani should be critical of me... is a very strange development. It's a very ironic posture, for him to be talking about personal judgment."
But as a Saturday article in The Post described, Giuliani's critics argue that his penchant for promoting people with thin resumes but strong personal or political ties to him goes beyond Kerik.
They point, among others, to his police commissioner prior to Kerik, Howard Safir, a former U.S. Marshal who went back 20 years with Giuliani and came under criticism for his handling of fatal shootings by police and for some ethical missteps, even as he presided over a continued decline in crime; Giuliani's choice for emergency management commissioner, Richie Sheirer, who spent most of his career as a fire department dispatcher; and Thomas Von Essen, Giuliani's choice for fire commissioner, who was far down the department's hierarchy but led a firefighters' union local that gave Giuliani a key endorsement.
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