IS THIS THE WAY GIULIANI WOULD RUN THE FEDERAL BUDGET?

NY POST - Rudy Giuliani said yesterday that obscure city agencies were billed for the out-of-town credit-card charges of his mayoral security detail because the NYPD was so slow in paying its bills. Hoping to limit the fallout on his presidential campaign, Giuliani told CBS's Katie Couric that the practice began during his first term and was a matter of convenience - not a sinister plot to hide expenses like time spent with then-girlfriend Judith Nathan. . .

Former Mayor Ed Koch, a frequent Giuliani critic who is supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, wasn't buying the explanation. "It's an outrageous way to govern," charged Koch. "In my judgment it's unwarranted and indefensible." Joe DeVincenzo, a former special assistant to Koch, said the NYPD during Koch's tenure didn't have a problem paying expenses of the mayor's police detail directly. Jonathan Gradees, executive director of New York State Defenders, was especially distressed at the $400,000 of travel bills paid through the Assigned Counsel Plan in fiscal 2001. The plan, which provides city-paid lawyers for indigent criminal defendants, was in financial turmoil that year, Gradees recalled. "It really was a moment in time when the last thing you'd want to do is dip into the till," he said.

TPM MUCKRAKER - In comments to the Politico, Anthony Carbonetti, a longtime aide to Rudy Giuliani and his chief of staff when he was mayor, told Ben Smith that this was the first he'd heard that the city comptroller had been asking about the mayor's charges to backwater agencies.

So we asked the city comptroller's office. And spokesman Jeff Simmons told us that the audit, which focused on $34,000 of travel charges to one of those obscure agencies, the New York City Loft Board, had indeed begun in 2001, when Rudy was still mayor. The comptroller had made "repeated requests to the Loft Board and Mayor's Office for further information and was stonewalled," he said.

Of course, that stonewalling has continued in the Bloomberg administration, which has refused to discuss the charges, citing "security," although they did refer the matter to the city Department of Investigations, where it seems to have disappeared.