Giuliani, who owes $148 million for defaming election workers, lectures the mayor on how to honor 9/11.

…(cont) Which is how, by the only road I know, I get to a figure I had to go dig up — hang on — a hundred and forty-eight million dollars. That's what a federal jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay, in December of 2023, to two Georgia election workers he defamed with false fraud claims about the 2020 election. I want to sit with the word the jury used, because it's specific: defamed. Not "criticized." Not "disagreed with." Two named people, a jury, that word. It's easy to lose the two people behind a number that size — a hundred and forty-eight million is the kind of figure you say once out loud and then never say again, like a number you'll never need to dial.

This week, that same man called for Zohran Mamdani to skip New York's 9/11 memorial, according to the New York Times, during what the Times describes as an anti-Muslim diatribe. The mayor has said he's — sorry, the mayor has said Mamdani is going anyway. And the Georgia judgment isn't even the only debt still open: CNN reports Dominion Voting Systems has pending lawsuits against election deniers, Giuliani among them, a separate case, a separate set of lies, still sitting the way my envelopes sit.

Here's the word I want to circle, and I promise I'll only come back to it once. Before any of this, Mamdani signed a mayoral order recognizing September 11th as a Day of Remembrance, and told CBS the ceremony should be about remembrance, not politics. I don't know a cleaner word for what a person owes the dead. I also don't know a cleaner word for what a jury says a person owes the living — that's a debt too, the kind with a number attached, the kind that shows up in an envelope, the kind a person gets to decide, every single morning, whether today's the day he deals with it or whether he idles in the Cash lane one more time.

So there's a lecture out there for the mayor on how to properly run a memorial. I don't have an argument with that — I don't do arguments in this column, I only write down what I found in the glovebox. I'll just ask you to hold two things the way you'd hold two tolls at once: a man is telling the city how to remember, correctly, on a day. And a jury already told him, in writing, on a specific date, exactly what he owes, and to whom, and he has had roughly a thousand days since to find out whether that's a debt he intends to honor too.

One more thing, before you go. The two women that jury named — are they on his list for remembrance?