The same issues that brough insecurity...

[Chiwas]

...were going to bring the secretary of security.

Lack of information and inability of the responsible positions, disregard of the functions. Couldn't a way more simple embarrasment be prevented with a little search?

In other words, for the most delicated function -imo- since 9/11, and one that seemed planned to cope with the faults or gaps, Intelligence and intelligence didn't work or didn't show up. An anonymous HR manager in a small firm would have prevented it in a routine manner.

(Supossing that in both cases actually there wasn't [prior] information)

Lack of vocation, we use to say.

[dude1394]

Huh?

[MavKikiNYC]

More to the story....



Kerik cheated on wife with Judith Regan and correction officer
Now his double affair laid bare
BY RUSS BUETTNER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik conducted two extramarital affairs simultaneously, using a secret Battery Park City apartment for the passionate liaisons, the Daily News has learned.
The first relationship, spanning nearly a decade, was with city Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero; the second, and more startling, was with famed publishing titan Judith Regan.

His affair with Regan, the stunningly attractive head of her own book publishing company, lasted for almost a year.

Dramatically, each woman learned of the existence of the other after Pinero discovered a love note left by Regan in the apartment.

The revelations about Kerik's private life come as repercussions over his suitability to be nominated for the post of secretary of homeland security. Kerik, 49, married with two children from his current marriage, withdrew his name from consideration in a sudden and unexpected call to the White House on Friday night.

Kerik said that questions about the immigration status of his family's former nanny and failure to pay taxes prompted his decision to walk away from the job. But speculation has continued that there were deeper and more controversial reasons.

Yesterday, The News reported that a six-month investigation showed Kerik had accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts without proper disclosure, and had ties to a construction company that investigators believe is linked to the mob.

Now revelations about his private life also cast a shadow on his suitability for one of the administration's highest-profile cabinet positions.

Asked about the affairs and the secret love nest yesterday, Joseph Tacopina, Kerik's attorney, said Kerik and Regan had denied the affair in the past.

Tacopina said Kerik's "friendship" with Pinero ended in 1996.

He would not comment on the apartment.

Regan could not be reached for comment.

But sources with intimate knowledge of both affairs painted a picture of passionate, and sometimes volatile, liaisons.

The tumultuous Regan-Kerik romance carried on for months, through the writing, publication and promotion of his autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," which Regan's company published.

The two worked out together most mornings at the New York Sports Club in Rockefeller Center and often dined at Fresco restaurant in midtown, according to sources.

Kerik visited Regan's Central Park West apartment almost daily, and occasionally stayed the night, with his police detail camped outside.

They became so close that Kerik's two nieces stayed with Regan while the commissioner's sister was hospitalized, one source said.

Regan visited the Battery Park apartment several times, the source said, but apparently never knew that his actual residence at that time was an apartment on E. 79th St.

Furnished corporate rentals similar to the unit Kerik used, according to the sources, are advertised at monthly rents from $3,150 to $6,200. Representatives of Milstein Properties, whichs owns the Liberty View, could not be reached yesterday.

After one encounter, Regan left a romantic note, which was later discovered by Pinero. The two later spoke on the phone.

"She wanted to know if Judith was still seeing him," the source said. "She told Regan about their affair and Regan told her she was shocked."

Many close to Kerik in the mid-1990s assumed that someday he would marry Pinero, a career correction officer described as spirited and attractive by friends, a close friend and a former high-ranking Correction Department source said.

The relationship continued after Kerik married Hala Matli, a hygienist in his dentist's office whom he met in mid-1996 and wed in November 1998, according to multiple sources close to Pinero and Kerik.

Kerik's affair with Pinero is at the center of two lawsuits against the city, both brought by correction employees who claimed Kerik retaliated after they crossed her.

The city settled one last year for $250,000, The News reported at the time.

The second suit, in which Pinero and Kerik were deposed last week, was filed by former Deputy Warden Eric DeRavin 3rd, who claims Kerik quashed his promotion after he reprimanded Pinero. The city demanded a gag order on both depositions.

Pinero declined to comment.

But sources with whom she has spoken said that on her trips to the Battery Park City apartment, Pinero was shuttled in through a side service door.

"She's going to be my wife for as long we live. I support her 100%," said Pinero's husband, who asked that his name be withheld.

Yesterday, Kerik remained at his $1.2 million home in Franklin Lakes, N.J.

After announcing his decision to withdraw his name from the top homeland security post, he remained at the house over the weekend, emerging only twice to talk to media.

On both occasions, he stressed that he had made the decision to withdraw his name from consideration solely on the basis of problems with the family nanny.

He said he had realized on Wednesday evening that there were issues with the woman's immigration status and tax status.

He added that he wanted to avoid any embarrassment to the President, with whom he had stood side-by-side at a press conference announcing his nomination just a week before.

Kerik, who had a national profile after the events of 9/11, had been one of Bush's most enthusiastic public supporters during the election campaign.

[MavKikiNYC]

METRO MATTERS
The Troubles of Mr. Kerik, Ex-Nominee
By JOYCE PURNICK

Published: December 13, 2004


WHAT was Bernard Kerik thinking?

That's what most of the country must have wondered as they watched the former police commissioner implode. With his vulnerabilities so obvious, how could he allow the president to nominate him as secretary of homeland security, and how could he assume he'd be confirmed?

New Yorkers might have told their fellow citizens what he was thinking. They had seen it all before. Mr. Kerik was acting as a graduate of the willful Giuliani administration, which ruled New York pretty much as it wanted to.

Most of America knows the heroic Rudolph W. Giuliani, celebrated for his masterful leadership after Sept. 11. But before the terrorist attacks, Mr. Giuliani's popularity had dropped at home. Even fans had tired of his aggressive style.

On the premise that it took tough leadership to tame New York, the former mayor conducted himself with unapologetic hubris, surrounding himself with a deferential inner circle - including Bernard B. Kerik as commissioner of correction and then commissioner of the police.

The insular Giuliani team could be secretive, could play loose with people's rights and would even violate the law, attracting lawsuits that City Hall usually lost.

If the Giuliani administration wanted to keep public information from civic groups, elected officials or news organizations, it did. If Mr. Giuliani wanted to release the sealed juvenile records of an unarmed man killed by a police detective, he did. If he wanted to give a government job to a political ally's unqualified son (later indicted for defrauding the city), he did.

The tough-guy approach no doubt played a role in controlling the city that once seemed ungovernable, but by the end of the Giuliani years, it had more than begun to pall. Not, however, with such loyal Giuliani adherents as Mr. Kerik.

Mr. Kerik had been with Mr. Giuliani for years, starting as a chauffeur in the 1993 mayoral campaign. Anyone who worked with him will tell you that Mr. Kerik, too, pretty much did as he wished.

So it is not surprising that he used police officers to do research for his memoir, incurring a $2,500 fine from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. Or that he sent homicide investigators to question and fingerprint several Fox News employees because his publisher, Judith Regan, had apparently suspected them of stealing her cellphone and necklace.

So many questions have been raised about Mr. Kerik and are still being investigated by news organizations that it is hard to believe that only the nanny issue is what scuttled his nomination, as he contends. Or that he did not know until last week that he had employed a nanny who might not be a legal immigrant and had not paid taxes on her behalf.

Let's say, for argument's sake, he just conveniently found out about her. Did he forget all the other matters likely to reach Senate and White House ears?

Did he not know of the awkward stories circulating about his romantic life, including one relationship in the Correction Department that figures in a civil lawsuit?

Did Mr. Kerik really assume he wouldn't be at least a bit tarnished by reports that in 1998 he was facing lawsuits and an arrest warrant for unpaid condominium fees (since paid, Mr. Kerik has said)? Did he dismiss the doubts about the job he did training police officers in Iraq last year?

WASN'T he worried that news reports had stirred qualms about the enormous profit he made from serving on the board of a stun-gun manufacturer, Taser International? Did he think the Senate would ignore the propriety of Taser pushing for business with markets regulated or controlled by federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security?

What about the news accounts that Mr. Kerik, as both correction and police commissioner, accepted and never reported gifts from people whose companies did business with the city? And what about his putting in a word with a city agency on behalf of a construction company with a possible relationship to organized crime - a company that employed his best man and his brother.

Obviously, there's a great deal to suggest that Mr. Kerik was, at the least, not headed for a smooth path to confirmation. Could it be he didn't realize that?

The guess here is that he knew all about the serious flaws in his background. But remember, he is accustomed to working in a climate that celebrated audacity and protected insiders. He must have thought that, as in his City Hall days, he was still immune.

[Chiwas]

Obviously, there's a great deal to suggest that Mr. Kerik was, at the least, not headed for a smooth path to confirmation.

Edit. He WAS headed for a smooth path to confirmation. Till they realized he stank. But why to hype before any -at the least- scrutiny?

[u2sarajevo]

Strain Is Seen in Giuliani Ties With President
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani had a Christmas dinner at the White House on Sunday night, and he attended with an important goal in mind: to apologize to his host for pushing Bernard B. Kerik as homeland security secretary and then watching as Mr. Kerik's nomination collapsed in legal problems and embarrassed the president of the United States.

That embarrassment has put a new strain on a mutually beneficial relationship that has always been more complicated than mere friendship.

"I feel very bad," Mr. Giuliani said in a telephone interview on Sunday afternoon, adding that he felt somewhat responsible for the nomination of Mr. Kerik, who withdrew his name on Friday because he had failed to pay taxes for a nanny who was in the country illegally.

"Even though there was never a conversation about it, I realize that one of the reasons they did it was because of my confidence in Bernie over the years," he said. "And I feel like maybe I should have involved myself more in it."

Mr. Giuliani added that he did not think the situation would hurt his relationship with President Bush or the White House. "It doesn't and shouldn't affect my feelings toward them, and I don't think it will affect their feelings toward me," he said. "We're friends."

The view at the White House is somewhat different. Although people close to the president say he likes and respects Mr. Giuliani, they say the president has long been leery of him as a man who could not be counted on for the loyalty demanded by Mr. Bush. And while the breakdown of Mr. Kerik's nomination is not lethal to Mr. Giuliani's relationship with the White House, the friends and officials say, it will hardly burnish his credentials with the president.

"It hurts him politically, so therefore by extension it's going to hurt him with the White House," said a Republican close to the administration who has worked for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Giuliani and who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the situation. "Nobody at the White House is saying to themselves, 'Damn that Rudy Giuliani.' It's more, 'Well, he got his licks.' "

In the interview, Mr. Giuliani indicated that he should have known about Mr. Kerik's legal problems because he had named him police commissioner and then had gone into business with him. The former mayor seemed to suggest as much in a phone call on Saturday morning to Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff.

"I said, 'Well, I wish I had figured it out earlier,' " Mr. Giuliani said. "That's what I was apologizing for, that we hadn't figured this out earlier. And Andy said something like, 'Well, Bernie just focused on it you know, this is a very difficult process.' They were very nice about it."

Suzy DeFrancis, a White House spokeswoman, said on Sunday: "I'm sure Rudy Giuliani is held in high respect at the White House and among the American people as well. He's a great supporter of the president."

The invitation to the Christmas dinner, in fact, came well before Mr. Kerik's nomination.

Mr. Giuliani and his wife were also overnight guests during the campaign at the president's 1,600-acre ranch in Texas, an invitation the president reserves for prime ministers, heads of state and his closest friends. The sleepover, Republicans said, was both a thank-you for Mr. Giuliani's tireless campaigning and a reflection of the president's political need to publicly associate himself with the man who rallied New York after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"If the war on terror is your campaign's number one issue, there's no better symbol of that than Rudy Giuliani," said a government official who knows Mr. Bush and Mr. Giuliani and who asked not to be identified because he did not want to be seen as denigrating the mayor's relationship with the president. "But you shouldn't confuse that with closeness."

Mr. Giuliani said in the interview that he could not recall when he met Mr. Bush, but said he first spent significant time with him on a trip to Austin, Tex., in the fall of 1999. Mr. Giuliani, then mayor, was close to running for the Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Mr. Bush, then governor, would soon be running in the Republican primaries against Senator John McCain of Arizona.

"I went to visit him because I was trying to decide who to support - John McCain, who I knew really well, who was a good friend, or Governor Bush, who I didn't know as well, but I thought had a better chance of winning," Mr. Giuliani said.

The mayor ended up endorsing the better bet, Mr. Bush. But during the Republican primary in New York the following March, he barely appeared in public at the side of Mr. Bush, who was fresh from his embrace of religious conservatives in the South Carolina primary. Instead, Mr. Giuliani lavished praise on the independent-minded Mr. McCain. Mr. Giuliani's advisers worried at the time that if the mayor made too many appearances with Mr. Bush, he would alienate the Democrats and swing voters he needed to defeat Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Bush's advisers brushed off the mayor's brush-off as a necessity of New York politics.

But Republicans say that Mr. Bush felt little affection for Mr. Giuliani, and that he was particularly perplexed as the mayor allowed his personal life to unravel publicly in the spring of 2000.

"There aren't a lot of people close to the president who have those kind of experiences," said the Republican close to the administration, referring to Mr. Giuliani's admissions of infidelity with the woman who became his third wife and to his bitter split from his second wife, Donna Hanover.

"It's an issue of not understanding it. I've had discussions with him where he's asked, 'What's this guy all about?' "

But on the morning that two commercial airliners flew into the World Trade Center, a new relationship between the two men was forged. People close to Mr. Bush say he considers the mayor a true hero for his actions on that day and developed a bond with him in the aftermath. Mr. Giuliani readily agreed.

"He gave us immediately all the things that we needed," Mr. Giuliani recalled. "We got all the resources of the federal government put at our disposal, mine and the governor's."

Mr. Giuliani added: "He just told them, 'Give him everything he wants and make sure they have all the support that they need and put all your people right there and let's break down all the barriers."'

Since then, Mr. Giuliani has been repeatedly mentioned as a possibility for a cabinet position, although rarely, if ever, by anyone in the inner circle at the White House. Although the White House has noticed that Mr. Giuliani is far less combative than he was during his days at City Hall, a top administration official once noted that the former mayor would be good for any job that didn't require him to get along with people.

Advisers to Mr. Bush add that as Mr. Giuliani contemplates a run for president in 2008, there is virtually no chance he will be named to a position in the administration because he would have, they say, his own agenda.

As for Mr. Giuliani, he said he expected to soon have Mr. Kerik back in the Times Square offices of Giuliani Partners, where they have worked together since leaving city government at the end of 2001. The partnership, which is staffed by many of Mr. Giuliani's top former City Hall aides, will emerge from this debacle largely unscathed, Mr. Giuliani insisted.

Ultimately, Mr. Giuliani said, the most damaging part for him about the turn of events over the last two weeks is not the political implications.

"It is a personal embarrassment," he said. "I don't like making mistakes. This is something that could have been avoided."