Free Republic

Editor’s Note: Details of the WFB’s Democracy Alliance exposé can be found here. A leading voice in the world of liberal foundations has a side project funding the left-wing billionaire’s club known as the Democracy Alliance, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Judith Avery, who serves as chair of the $24 million Durfee Fund and president of the $38 million Baytree Fund, is also a member of the secretive network of Democratic millionaires and billionaires. Avery’s father, R. Stanton Avery, invented stickers and turned the product into a multi-billion dollar industry. He founded the Durfee Foundation, named...

Giuliani Partners, Rudy's consulting firm, has laid off staffers as the business is reshaped after his failed presidential campaign........layoffs involved at least five administrative staffers.

Rudy catches a buss from wife Judi in Florida Tuesday night. She brought enough political baggage to fill a Louis Vuitton trunk. Indeed, part of Rudy Giuliani's presidential flameout can be traced back to his Judi - the woman he fell for in a cigar bar in 1999 while he was the married mayor with a wife and two young children at home. "She was a major part of the reason for Giuliani's collapse," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "Rudy wanted to head up the 'family values' party, and Judi didn't fit...

A Play in One Act* "Just promise me one thing John, you will always take my calls?" "Are you kidding? Anytime Rudy!" "And Tony Carbonetti's too?" "Err, ok.." "And can Judi please have something, a beautification commission maybe?" "Uh, I did sort of tell Cindy she could have that..." "Well, forget beautification. Judi would be great for any kind of health thing. You know she's a nurth! You could put her on your health insurance commission, not as chairman obviously, but vice chair I think would be perfect." "Rudy, here's my hand on it. I don't know what the...

Giuliani billed obscure agencies for trips By: Ben Smith November 28, 2007 02:55 PM EST As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records. The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding...

The New York Times exonerates Rudy Giuliani from charges that he moved travel expenses around through subsidiary agencies in order to hide his affair with his now-wife, Judith. People looking for that exoneration on their feedreaders will find themselves frustrated. Not only did the Times bury the story on one of its blogs, it put it in a graphic format that doesn't allow for copy-and-paste. In fact, it isn't even shown as an entry on the blog itself: All eight of Mr. Giuliani's trips to the Hamptons in 1999 and 2000, including the period when his relationship was a secret,...

--SNIP--Giuliani's messy personal life is a big turnoff to women voters....causing the public humiliation of his second wife, tax-paid bodyguards for his girlfriend and a frosty relationship with his kids: It all makes wives and moms around the country skeptical of putting him in the White House. "If he can't control his personal life, I just don't see how he can control the country," said a Lucas, Kan housewife. Fifty % of women overall - and 48% of GOP women - said that Giuliani dumping second wife Donna Hanover at a 2000 press conference would make them less likely to...

... Giuliani's concern for Nathan's security should not come as a surprise to anyone. In his best-selling 2002 memoir "Leadership," Giuliani recounts that one of his main concerns on Sept. 11, 2001 was that the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers and Pentagon might also be coming after Nathan. He describes his priorities after he and his top advisers finally managed to find a site, a firehouse, to serve as a new command center after fleeing the one at the World Trade Center. He and his team called city hospitals to make sure they were ready for the injured. Then...

WASHINGTON -- Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Sunday defended the expenses incurred by his security detail as he was beginning an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan, saying police made the decision after she received threats. Giuliani in recent weeks has faced a barrage of questions about New York police security costs for his trysts with Nathan and about his business clients, which have included the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. Although a U.S. ally, Qatar is accused of sheltering suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Smiling broadly and laughing at some of the tougher questions...

WASHINGTON - Rudy Giuliani doggedly insisted Sunday that threats against then-girlfriend Judith Nathan prompted the NYPD to launch her taxpayer-funded chauffeur services. "These were all based upon threat assessments made by the New York City Police Department ... of what was necessary to protect her life, my life, other people's lives," Giuliani told NBC’s Tim Russert. "Every single thing done here was done based upon the assessment of someone else that this was necessary." His explanation of Nathan's car service doesn't square with Friday’s Daily News exclusive report, citing multiple witnesses and a law enforcement source, that she was being...

It's not easy keeping track of Rudy Giuliani's shag-related expenditures of taxpayer money while mayor of New York. For one thing, it's impossible to get a total of the amount spent guarding the mayor's then-girlfriend. And the available records are spotty at best. But we gave it the ol' TPM try. So here, without further ado, is our timeline. 5/99 -- Judith Nathan and Giuliani meet at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on the Upper East Side. 7/3/99 -- NYPD Officers charge the city for gas to "accompany the mayor to Southampton." 7/31/99 -- Four officers accompanying Giuliani stay at...

Giuliani tried to ride out new questions over taxpayer-funded chauffeur police services witnesses said were provided to Judith Nathan well before the married mayor revealed his extramarital involvement in 2000..... asked about Nathan's city-funded wheels, Giuliani non-answered "Thank you," and "Have a good night." Nathan's police escorts were thought to have begun in December 2000, after Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said she was threatened and needed around-the-clock protection. (Giuliani hid security detail and travel expenses for Nathan in obscure city agencies.) "If Nathan was provided police protection prior to their being a security-threat assessment, it probably was an illegal use...

Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed - even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News. "It went on for months before the affair was public," said Lee Degenstein, 52, a retired Smith Barney vice president who formerly lived at 200 E. 94th St., Nathan's old building. "It was going on longer than anybody thought," added Degenstein, who, along with others in the neighborhood, said they often saw Nathan hopping into unmarked NYPD cars in early 2000, before the affair was revealed that May.

Rudy Giuliani'S breakup with Donna Hanover cost tax payers a lot more than his extramarital relationship with Judith Nathan, according to city documents. The documents show that the distraught Hanover repeatedly fled Gracie Mansion to seek refuge with her parents in California as her high-profile marriage was crumbling. At all times, she was accompanied by an NYPD security detail that ran up at least $110,000 in credit-card charges for airfare, lodging, car rentals and gasoline. "They're stuck on you," said one source of the protective detail. "They go where you go." In June 2000 - a month after Giuliani shocked...

Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. "She used the PD as her personal taxi service," said one former city official who worked for Giuliani. New York papers reported in 2000 that the city had provided a security detail for Nathan, who became Giuliani's third wife after his divorce from Donna Hanover, who also had her own police security detail at the same time. The former city officials said Giuliani...

REPORTS: PUBLISHER JUDITH REGAN TO FILE $100 MILLION SUIT AGANIST MURDOCH EMPIRE IN NY COURT; WILL BE REPPED BY SUPERLAWYER BERT FIELDS... DEVELOPING... Just a header on Drudge right now.. Regan grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1971.[1] She then attended Vassar College, receiving her A.B. degree in 1975. Then in 1978, while working as a secretary at Harvard, Regan answered a newspaper ad for a reporter for The National Enquirer and got the job. In the early 1980s, Regan relocated to New York City. After the 911 attacks in 2001, Regan published...

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- A day after urging people to "leave my family alone," Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Friday said he'll talk about his family _ on his terms. "Sure I will," Giuliani told reporters outside a cafe where he visited with voters. "But I'll talk about it appropriately, and in a way to preserve as much as I can the privacy of my family and my children, which I think any decent person would." Giuliani asked again _ as he did Thursday _ that people judge him on his record as New York City mayor and a federal...

(Political Animal) THE BUNKER....When Rudy Giuliani finally agreed to build an emergency-command center in New York City back in 1996, the city's emergency management director recommended a site in Brooklyn: it was a safe location, had a low profile, and could be built quickly. Giuliani refused. He wanted a location he could walk to, so the command bunker ended up in the World Trade Center instead, where it was destroyed on 9/11. But there's more. Mark Kleiman points out this paragraph from Wayne Barrett's takedown of Giuliani in the Village Voice:Giuliani's office [in the bunker] had a humidor for cigars and...

JUDITH GIULIANI likes to have an empty seat next to her on the campaign plane for “Baby Louis”—her Louis Vuitton handbag. Jeri Thompson is a “trophy wife” with a taste for low-cut dresses and gold-lamé wedge sandals. Ann Romney has five children and ten grandchildren. Elizabeth Kucinich sports a tongue-stud. These are just a small sample of titbits about would-be first ladies culled from the press. There is nothing new in Americans taking an interest in the spouses of potential presidents, or in the media being cruel to them. How better to find out about a person's true nature...

"That's no first lady, that's my wife!" -- Badabump. -- It's open season apparently on the wives and children of GOP presidential candidates. In a display of judgment worthy of People magazine, Washington Post editors decided the fact that Mrs. Fred Thompson once had a boyfriend when she was single is big news. (Gee, did Michelle Obama? Would Elizabeth Edwards kiss on a first date?) Meanwhile, The New York Times ran a story on the Giulianis' response to Vanity Fair's nasty little gossipy profile of Judith Giuliani, Giuliani's Princess Bride." OK, so the tiara was a bit much. And true,...