{"id":57692,"date":"2016-11-26T14:59:20","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T18:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=57692"},"modified":"2016-11-26T15:02:23","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T19:02:23","slug":"why-is-rudy-giuliani-lobbying-so-hard-for-the-secretary-of-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=57692","title":{"rendered":"Why is Rudy Giuliani lobbying so hard for the Secretary of State?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rudy Giuliani Lobbies to Be Secretary of State<\/h2>\n

Former New York City mayor says his experience makes him uniquely qualified<\/h3>\n

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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<\/p><\/div>\n

By MARA GAY and FELICIA SCHWARTZ<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 2012 presidential nominee and former investment banker. But Mr. Giuliani and his allies continue to press his case.<\/p>\n

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway joined in on Thursday: \u201cReceiving deluge of social media & private comms re: Romney Some Trump loyalists warn against Romney as sec of state,\u201d she wrote in a post on Twitter.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI probably have traveled in the last 13 years as much as Hillary did in the years she was secretary of state,\u201d Mr. Giuliani said, in a reference to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential race to Mr. Trump.\u00a0\u201cMy knowledge of foreign policy is as good, or better, than anybody they\u2019re talking to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been to England eight times, Japan six times, France five times. China three times\u2014once with Bill Clinton, by the way,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t say I don\u2019t know the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Giuliani\u2019s quest for the nation\u2019s 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\u2019t respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

In addition to secretary of state, Mr. Giuliani is being considered for the country\u2019s most senior spy position, director of national intelligence, according to people familiar with the transition team\u2019s deliberations.<\/p>\n

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After leaving the mayoral office in\u00a02001, Mr. Giuliani founded Giuliani\u00a0Partners, a management-consulting and security firm that advises companies and foreign governments on policing, security planning and counterterrorism.<\/p>\n

His firm and its subsidiaries have held security-consulting\u00a0contracts with the governments of Qatar and Colombia, as well asTransCanada<\/a>, the company attempting to build the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama last year rejected the company\u2019s application to build the pipeline in the U.S. after a recommendation by Secretary of State John Kerry.<\/p>\n

Juan Carlos Pinzon, Colombia\u2019s defense minister from 2011 to 2015 and now the country\u2019s ambassador in Washington, said he personally worked with Mr. Giuliani a few years ago on a security project.\u00a0He said Mr. Giuliani\u2019s work in the country included pursuing policies to decrease homicide rates in Medell\u00edn, Cali and other cities.<\/p>\n

\u201cAreas\u00a0of high crime rates were\/are a major concern for the Colombian government,\u201d Mr. Pinzon said in an email. \u201cGiuliani\u2019s advice focused on addressing this\u00a0[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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Pinzon didn\u2019t reply to questions about how long the project lasted or how much the Colombian government paid Mr. Giuliani for the work. Mr. Giuliani didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on how much he earned.<\/p>\n

Mr. Giuliani\u2019s firm also did consulting for retired heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko\u00a0during\u00a0his unsuccessful run for mayor of Kiev, Ukraine in 2008. Mr. Giuliani\u2019s firm advised the campaign on anticorruption policy, according to news reports. Mr. Klitschko went on to win the office in 2014.<\/p>\n

The company has held contracts with the Mexico City Civic Organization\u2014a group of private businessmen who paid Mr. Giuliani\u2019s firm to work with the Mexico City police\u2014and Royal Dutch Shell<\/a> PLC subsidiary Shell Oil Co..<\/p>\n

It has\u00a0also\u00a0done consulting\u00a0for Aleksandar Vucic, a Serbian politician who was then running to be mayor of Belgrade and is now the country\u2019s prime minister.\u00a0In an interview on Serbian TV, Mr. Giuliani said he advised Mr. Vucic on economic development.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0Mr. Giuliani has ties to TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a consulting firm that aids Russian companies and has links to the Kremlin. According to the company\u2019s website<\/a>, the firm arranged in 2004 for Mr. Giuliani to travel to Moscow and meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and \u201cother prominent Russian politicians and businessmen.\u201d The firm also arranged other visits for Mr. Giuliani to visit Ukraine and Russia.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The 2006 disclosure, the most detailed accounting of Mr. Giuliani\u2019s business dealings since leaving the mayor\u2019s office, shows that his income that year was $16.1 million, including from the speeches and partnerships.\u00a0Among the groups that he appeared before are\u00a0 General Motors<\/a> Co., Shell Oil, Oklahoma State University, Merrill Lynch andJ.P. Morgan Chase<\/a> & Co.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cLeadership,\u201d an account of his role as mayor during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

Mr. Giuliani\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was willfully accepting payment to speak on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization, and he did it again and again,\u201d said Jeremiah Goulka, an analyst who worked on an extensive report on MEK by Rand Corp. in 2009, in a recent interview. \u201cI see him as a zealot for a highly dubious cultic group with no support in Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Giuliani said those concerns were unfounded and unfair. He said \u201c90%\u201d of the work undertaken by the firm is done on behalf of companies, not governments. \u201cI don\u2019t even know how to peddle influence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Giuliani said he stands by his assertion that MEK isn\u2019t a terrorist group.<\/p>\n

Ethics experts said Mr. Giuliani\u2019s work for foreign governments wouldn\u2019t prevent him from taking a job in the Trump administration but would likely raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n

\u2014Jay Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi contributed to this article.<\/p>\n

__
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Rudy Giuliani Lobbies to Be Secretary of State Former New York City mayor says his experience makes him uniquely qualified<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}