So it seems we've got the first response from Rudy on the Shag Fund controversy. From the AP ...

Rudy Giuliani dismissed a report Wednesday that he expensed the cost of his security detail to obscure city offices for trips to a Long Island resort as the then-mayor began an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan.

"First of all, it's not true," he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. "I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't.

"And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them," Giuliani said. "I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately."

So he sort of denies it. But he actually just said he left it to the police and he figures they did it right. "They handled them in the way they handled them" -- what you might call Rudy's trademark aggressive truism.

Read closely, Rudy isn't denying anything. He's just saying he's not responsible.

He says the security detail went with me everywhere, i.e., they had to come when I went to visit Judy too. And I can't be responsible for where they billed the expense to. So Rudy's argument is that in the city he runs, actually in the office of the mayor, someone else was hiding these charges to shield the affair. But not him and he didn't know about it.

A few points on this. Rudy seems to be leaving a pretty big door open to suggest that if these funds weren't handled in a normal way it was the cops who did it not him. I've been told though that Bernie Kerik took a hands on supervisory role running Rudy's security detail all through his administration. When he was over at Corrections and when he was Police Commissioner. Bernie and Rudy are sort of bird's of a feather on this sort of thing. So I'd say you want to give Bernie Kerik a pretty close look on this whole thing.

If not Kerik, what about the NYPD? He's saying whatever happened was their doing. Can we talk to them and see what they say?

The AP article also says ...

Later, an aide said that for accounting purposes, the expenses appear to have been temporarily allocated to city offices and paid for out of the mayor's budget but that the police department ultimately picked up the tab and reimbursed the mayor's office at the end of each year.

Is that really true? Can we get an answer on that?