Andrew Zajac
Rudolph Giuliani spent much of his hour-long stint on Meet the Press this morning defending his judgment — about Bernard Kerik and about business deals that have connected him to a Qatari government official with ties to alleged 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a Hong Kong businessman with ties to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.
Regarding Kerik, his one-time police commissioner now under federal indictment on corruption charges, Giuliani said that was a big mistake in vetting for which he took responsibility.
But the former New York mayor urged MTP host Tim Russert to take the quantitative view: He’s appointed hundreds of people to high positions and very few of them have gone south like Kerik.
Of course, very few of them have leveraged friendship with Giuliani to win nomination to be secretary of Homeland Security, either.
Giuliani tried to defend his relationship with the government of Qatar — one of his firms does security consulting there — as a way of engaging people who might otherwise be inclined to hostility to the U.S.
Problem is, one of the key government ministers is Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, who is suspected of Al Qaeda sympathies and, in 1996, is thought to have warned KSM that the FBI wanted to arrest him. KSM fled and remained free to plan the attack that did so much to make Giuliani a politically-viable household name in 2008.
Regarding his connection to the Hong Kong businessman, Stanley Ho, Giuliani brushed it off as either minimal or untrue. It is neither.
In a Nov. 21 Tribune story, Giuliani representatives confirmed that Giuliani’s security consulting firm — the same one working in Qatar — provided security advice in late 2006 to a consortium involving Ho that was bidding, unsuccessfully as it turned out, on a casino license in Singapore.
About one-quarter of the consortium was made up of a joint venture called Melco PBL.
The Melco end of that JV is run by Lawrence Ho, son of the legendary and controversial Hong Kong billionaire Stanley Ho, who has been the major player in casino gaming in Macau since the early 1960s and who operates a casino in Pyongyang, thanks to close ties to the Kim regime. (Part of the ‘axis of evil’ according to one of George Bush’s State of the Union speeches.)
Ho also is thought by the U.S. government to have ties to Chinese organized crime.
Giuliani said Ho owned one percent of Melco and in any case, neither he not his company had anything to do with him.
Actually, Ho owns at least 1.77 percent and possibly as much as 6 percent of Melco, according to regulatory filings in the U.S. and Hong Kong.
Students of hostile takeovers know that that’s enough to force a company into play. But that would hardly seem to be necessary in Stanley Ho’s case, since he until recently had been chairman and largest shareholder of Melco until handing it off to son Lawrence.
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Melco reported spending more than $2 million as its share of costs for making the casino proposal, some of which presumably would be used to pay consultants, like Giuliani.
Giuliani’s business links to dubious characters have become an increasingly big part of the story about him, especially since new ones keep getting discovered. Also, in seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he’s presented himself as the toughest hardliner on crime and terrorism.
Russert offered him a chance to put an end to the questions and speculation by publicly listing all of his clients. But Giuliani said he’s not ready to do that, yet. Nor is he willing to sever ties to his Giuliani Partners consulting group.
Read the transcript of Giuliani’s appearance here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22170668/