POSTED: 11:02 am EDT May 29, 2007
UPDATED: 12:37 pm EDT May 30, 2007
NEW YORK — A radical group at a Bronx fundraiser confronted Rudolph Giuliani on Tuesday morning, accusing him of being one of the “criminals of 9/11.”
The Republican candidate for president was outside City Island’s Sea Shore restaurant in the Bronx, speaking with WNBC.com’s Adam Shapiro about his fundraising in New York.
Afterward, a young woman claiming to be the relative of a Sept. 11, 2001, firefighter who died when the towers collapsed, asked Giuliani why he allegedly told Peter Jennings the towers would fall that day, but did not stop the rescue efforts of firefighters and police officers.
The woman claims Giuliani knew the towers would fall, and allowed rescuers to go to their deaths. She asked him, “How do you sleep at night?”
Giuliani was extremely polite, telling the young woman she was wrong and that he never said what she claimed. At that point, another protester from her group, a young man, interrupted Giuliani with the same allegations.
Giuliani replied by saying, “I didn’t realize the towers would collapse.” He later added, “No one that I know of had any idea they would implode. That was a complete surprise.”
WNBC has obtained the transcript of Giuliani’s appearance with Jennings, from the Giuliani 2008 campaign. This is the verbatim of the issue in question:
“I–I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.”