http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-giuliani_bdoct28,1,6179203.storyWASHINGTON - Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.
Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.
That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as "America's mayor," serves as the foundation of Giuliani's presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.
It followed a pattern of tight control over information that the often combative Giuliani practiced as mayor, a pattern that included more than 100 legal challenges from one New York newspaper alone.
While no evidence has surfaced that the record was compromised, the city of New York nonetheless changed its laws to prevent another mayor from doing what Giuliani did. A coalition of archivists, historians and other city officials also raised questions about whether the documents would be sanitized, but the Giuliani Center was allowed to finish archiving the records.
Last December, as Giuliani prepared to announce his GOP presidential bid, the last of the documents were returned to New York's Municipal Archives, where they are now available for public inspection.