Ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who became known as "America's Mayor" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, revealed Wednesday that he'd told then-President George W. Bush that he wanted to be the one to put Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden to death.
"The anger was tremendous," Giuliani recalled on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "When I saw President Bush for the first time and he got off the helicopter, I was with Gov. George Pataki. He greeted the governor and came up to me...He says to me 'Rudy, what can I do?'"
"I said 'when you get Bin Laden, let me kill him, or I might have said execute him,'" Giuliani said.
He explained that he believes he was thinking as an attorney and that there would be a capital punishment case that he could prosecute.
"I had done that for two Nazis," said Giuliani. "I only had two capital cases in my career and both of them were Nazis. One had killed 7,000 people. Another had killed 12,000 people. A capital case is easy when it's like that."
The former mayor said he has many stories about the heroism that took place on 9/11, including the story of a senior citizen who let an elevator go without him while people were escaping the World Trade Center after its towers were hit.
The former mayor also said Wednesday that 9/11 is both the "saddest and happiest day" he can recall because even though it's painful, he also remembers how united Americans were after the attacks.
"Every year I go there and see all the families and the names," Giuliani said. "There was so much bravery. America was at its best for weeks after. You go back and you say now, I wish we could recapture half of that."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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