Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani did not take criticism lightly in his days at the Justice Department.
When two federal prosecutors openly complained about his meeting with a defense lawyer in a sensitive corporate fraud case he was overseeing, he slammed back.
"Immature petulance," he said of them, calling their charges "dangerous."
The pair saw special commendation awards they were due to get suddenly held back.
Papers released by the National Archives on Wednesday show Giuliani was a master of terse memos as associate attorney general. But get under his skin -- say, with an unfavorable story in the press or a challenge from a subordinate -- and he was in their face.
In one instance, he wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter telling a columnist why he had done nothing wrong in having a US marshal bring him a seat from old Yankee Stadium for his Washington office.
Before he became an international figure as the mayor of New York during the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Giuliani was the Justice Department's No. 3 official at the dawn of the Reagan administration in the 1980s and built a reputation as a solid professional in that politically charged transition from the Jimmy Carter years. He went on to serve as US attorney in New York before becoming mayor.
The papers shed light on his two years in the department -- and occasionally, on his short fuse. The documents are drawn from the files of his special assistants at Justice, Ken Caruso and Robert Bucknam, and from those of Jeffrey Harris, deputy associate attorney general.
Giuliani knocked heads with department prosecutors in the McDonnell Douglas case, a closely watched test of laws to restrain US corruption abroad. The aircraft maker had been indicted for making more than US$1 million in payoffs to Pakistani officials and defrauding Pakistan's airline by adding that cost to the price of the planes it was selling.
In May 1981, he and Caruso met the company's lawyer to discuss the case, which was expected to go to trial that fall. They touched on the possibility of a settlement, according to a memo. When the trial attorneys Michael Lubin and George Mendelson heard about it, they were livid.
They cited their superior's "conspicuous failure" to tell them he was meeting with the opposing side in a case he controlled, and said such actions eroded public confidence in the justice system.
Those were fighting words.
"Messrs. Lubin and Mendelson displayed a disrespect for the facts and an immature petulance that gives me pause as to the judgments they may have made during their period of service in the department," he said in a letter to the criminal division chief. "It is dangerous, to say the least, for prosecutors to shoot from the hip without checking the accuracy of their charges."
He said he saw no wrong in listening to arguments against proceeding with the case, and no need for the trial attorneys to attend. The department, he said, "is vitally interested in hearing from all sides."
Three months later, Giuliani dropped criminal charges against company executives in return for McDonnell Douglas' guilty plea to wire and mail fraud and making false statements. The company was fined US$55,000 and settled a civil suit for US$1.2 million.
An internal investigation cleared Giuliani of wrongdoing. Files on that investigation were among documents held back from release because of their sensitive nature.
The files on next year's presidential contender were released at the request of researchers.
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