Rudy Giuliani Lobbies to Be Secretary of State
Former New York City mayor says his experience makes him uniquely qualified
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani arriving to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan this month. PHOTO: MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
By MARA GAY and FELICIA SCHWARTZ
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City Mayor and Donald Trumployalist, has spent the past decade in the private sector traveling the world and making millions by giving speeches and consulting on security issues.
He has spent the last two weeks engaged in an unusually public fight to land the secretary-of-state slot in the next administration. Mr. Trump, the Republican president-elect, is also considering nominating Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee and former investment banker. But Mr. Giuliani and his allies continue to press his case.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway joined in on Thursday: “Receiving deluge of social media & private comms re: Romney Some Trump loyalists warn against Romney as sec of state,” she wrote in a post on Twitter.
As Donald Trump considers candidates for his cabinet, filling the post of secretary of state has been the subject of heated speculation. WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib discusses the list and what the choice could means for the incoming president. Photo: AP
In two recent interviews, Mr. Giuliani, 72, said his years of work as an international security consultant make him uniquely suited for the job in the Trump administration, along with the hard lessons he learned as mayor of a city that sustained the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I probably have traveled in the last 13 years as much as Hillary did in the years she was secretary of state,” Mr. Giuliani said, in a reference to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Trump. “My knowledge of foreign policy is as good, or better, than anybody they’re talking to,” he said.
By his own estimate, Mr. Giuliani says he has visited 80 foreign countries since he left office and made more than 150 foreign trips, often meeting with heads of state and other government officials.
“I’ve been to England eight times, Japan six times, France five times. China three times—once with Bill Clinton, by the way,” he said. “You can’t say I don’t know the world.”
Mr. Giuliani’s quest for the nation’s top diplomatic post is a sharp deviation from prior presidential transitions, in which candidates for top jobs avoided the news media so as not to damage their prospects. A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In addition to secretary of state, Mr. Giuliani is being considered for the country’s most senior spy position, director of national intelligence, according to people familiar with the transition team’s deliberations.
After leaving the mayoral office in 2001, Mr. Giuliani founded Giuliani Partners, a management-consulting and security firm that advises companies and foreign governments on policing, security planning and counterterrorism.
His firm and its subsidiaries have held security-consulting contracts with the governments of Qatar and Colombia, as well asTransCanada, the company attempting to build the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama last year rejected the company’s application to build the pipeline in the U.S. after a recommendation by Secretary of State John Kerry.
Juan Carlos Pinzon, Colombia’s defense minister from 2011 to 2015 and now the country’s ambassador in Washington, said he personally worked with Mr. Giuliani a few years ago on a security project. He said Mr. Giuliani’s work in the country included pursuing policies to decrease homicide rates in Medellín, Cali and other cities.
“Areas of high crime rates were/are a major concern for the Colombian government,” Mr. Pinzon said in an email. “Giuliani’s advice focused on addressing this [problem] based upon his successful experience in the city of New York, strengthening justice, penalties and the mind-set of the citizens themselves, able to trust public institutions again.”
Mr. Pinzon didn’t reply to questions about how long the project lasted or how much the Colombian government paid Mr. Giuliani for the work. Mr. Giuliani didn’t respond to a request for comment on how much he earned.
Mr. Giuliani’s firm also did consulting for retired heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko during his unsuccessful run for mayor of Kiev, Ukraine in 2008. Mr. Giuliani’s firm advised the campaign on anticorruption policy, according to news reports. Mr. Klitschko went on to win the office in 2014.
The company has held contracts with the Mexico City Civic Organization—a group of private businessmen who paid Mr. Giuliani’s firm to work with the Mexico City police—and Royal Dutch Shell PLC subsidiary Shell Oil Co..
It has also done consulting for Aleksandar Vucic, a Serbian politician who was then running to be mayor of Belgrade and is now the country’s prime minister. In an interview on Serbian TV, Mr. Giuliani said he advised Mr. Vucic on economic development.
And Mr. Giuliani has ties to TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a consulting firm that aids Russian companies and has links to the Kremlin. According to the company’s website, the firm arranged in 2004 for Mr. Giuliani to travel to Moscow and meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and “other prominent Russian politicians and businessmen.” The firm also arranged other visits for Mr. Giuliani to visit Ukraine and Russia.
Mr. Giuliani said he had never lobbied the American government or anyone else on behalf of other countries or companies. According to a disclosure form he filed in 2007 for his failed bid for president, he took home $9.2 million for more than 100 speeches in 2006 and early 2007 after fees collected by the Washington Speakers Bureau.
The 2006 disclosure, the most detailed accounting of Mr. Giuliani’s business dealings since leaving the mayor’s office, shows that his income that year was $16.1 million, including from the speeches and partnerships. Among the groups that he appeared before are General Motors Co., Shell Oil, Oklahoma State University, Merrill Lynch andJ.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
He was paid $1.6 million in 2006 and the first part of 2007 by a holding company called Giuliani & Company LLC, which his disclosure said he had a 30% share of. He also had a share of the profits valued at $2.5 million. Giuliani & Co. was one of several affiliated firms then under Mr. Giuliani’s control, including Giuliani Partners. He was also paid $1.2 million from the corporate law firm then known as Bracewell & Giuliani and received $146,092 in royalties for his book “Leadership,” an account of his role as mayor during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Mr. Giuliani’s firm has sought business throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, prompting some U.S. diplomats to be wary of his ties to foreign entities and governments.
Mr. Giuliani has been an outspoken proponent of regime change in Iran and scrapping the nuclear accord reached with Tehran last year. He has regularly appeared at events supporting an Iranian opposition group, called the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist organization from 1997 through 2012. His speaking fees for those events ranged from $25,000 to $40,000.
“He was willfully accepting payment to speak on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization, and he did it again and again,” said Jeremiah Goulka, an analyst who worked on an extensive report on MEK by Rand Corp. in 2009, in a recent interview. “I see him as a zealot for a highly dubious cultic group with no support in Iran.”
Mr. Giuliani said those concerns were unfounded and unfair. He said “90%” of the work undertaken by the firm is done on behalf of companies, not governments. “I don’t even know how to peddle influence,” he said.
Mr. Giuliani said he stands by his assertion that MEK isn’t a terrorist group.
Ethics experts said Mr. Giuliani’s work for foreign governments wouldn’t prevent him from taking a job in the Trump administration but would likely raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.
—Jay Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi contributed to this article.
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