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Frank Keating would be good.

All this talk about Rudy is silly. Guiliani has no desire to get buried in a rathole like the CIA.

He knows he's bound for the Senate, the Governor's Mansion in Albany, or the White House.

He doesn't need the CIA on his resume.

How about good ol Frank Keating?

I remember talk of Keatings when his name first came up for various positions in the administration in 2001. He has some sort of quirky financial dealings/loans from private sector that made him damaged goods. He paid off the loans but the dems were sreaming about the legality of it all.

Too bad. Keating is an excellent choice. He was a former CIA agent too.

Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who believed he was a top candidate for President-elect George W. Bush's Attorney General, quietly took cash gifts totaling about $250,000 from one of his top political fund-raisers, ex-Wall Street financier Jack Dreyfus, Newsweek has learned. The payments were made for nearly a decade and may have cost Keating the nomination, Newsweek reports.

In 1990, when Keating was chief counsel at HUD, Dreyfus offered to give each of his three kids a cash Christmas gift of $10,000. HUD officials approved, agreeing the gifts were unrelated to Keating's official duties. The payments, Keating confirms, continued annually for nearly 10 years after he left HUD, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the January 15 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 8).

Keating, elected governor in 1994, has never disclosed these gifts in Oklahoma; state law doesn't require it. He sees no problem with the payments. In papers submitted to Bush campaign officials last year, he called Dreyfus "a kind and generous man" who has never asked for "any actions or material returns from me" -- a sentiment he repeated in conversation with Newsweek last week.

Keating first met Dreyfus, founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds, in 1988, when Keating was Ronald Reagan's associate attorney general. Dreyfus met with Keating to promote the virtues of Dilantin, a mood-altering drug he thought could be used to control violent federal prisoners. Keating set up a meeting for Dreyfus, who has no financial interest in the drug, with top officials at the Bureau of Prisons. Nothing came of it, but the two became friends.

Yet over the years Dreyfus continued to press Keating about Dilantin and two years ago, Keating arranged for Dreyfus to meet Oklahoma's state prison director. Nothing came of that session either, Isikoff reports.