Rudy's Bogus Expense Story Bogus?

You mean that all the breathless assertions that Rudy Giuliani was expensing his trips to see then girlfriend Judy Nathan were just so much hot air?

You mean that the reporting clearing Rudy of wrongdoing was splashed across the front page of the same papers and outlets that originally reported it?

You haven't been paying attention, have you. Bryan York was, and here's where the Times put the latest story to fall by the wayside:

The headlines have dogged Rudolph W. Giuliani's presidential campaign for weeks. "Security costs for trysts draw attention," said one. The articles questioned whether, as mayor, Mr. Giuliani tried to hide his visits to Judith Nathan in the Hamptons by burying the associated security costs in the budgets of obscure mayoral agencies like the Loft Board.

The answer is not likely, according to a review of the city records originally cited as the basis for the assertion.

All eight of Mr. Giuliani's trips to the Hamptons in 1999 and 2000, including the period when his relationship was a secret, were charged to his own mayoral expense account, according to the records.

After his affair became public, the mayor's office in 2001 did charge several trips to the Hamptons to the Assigned Counsel Plan, which was designed to coordinate legal efforts for the poor.

But the total cost of those trips, $2,474, represents less than 1 percent of the $281,338 in travel expenses that was charged to the obscure agencies.

And those expenses were not incurred until two years after Mr. Giuliani's office first began to shift some mayoral travel expenses to lesser-known units.

It's still not clear why Mr. Giuliani's office did that, or why it began prepaying his American express bills, both practices that other administrations frowned upon. Former Giuliani administration officials say the shifting of expenses was a temporary, and appropriate maneuver until the Police Department reimbursed the mayor's office for the security expenses.

The Bloomberg administration is still looking for the backup records for $40,000 of the $632,119 in travel costs that Mr. Giuliani's office incurred between May 1999 and December 2001, when Mr. Giuliani left office.

But the records reviewed so far, which account for 93 percent of the mayor travel expenses for that period, suggest that Mr. Giuliani's efforts to see Ms. Nathan, who is now his wife, had nothing to do with any accounting legerdemain.

This is politics, so whatever thinly sourced story that can smear a candidate will often make its way into the media, and often it's just an attempt to see what sticks.

The expensing stories appear to have stuck to Rudy, in part because it comes at a time when Rudy's buddy Bernard Kerik is facing serious legal troubles. We've seen similarly thinly sourced stories run about John Edwards, and we'll be sure to see plenty of others run before the election in 2008. Some of these stories will have legs, others will be mere flesh wounds to a campaign.