I reported in late August that hardliner Daniel Pipes was advising Rudy Giuliani’s campaign. Since then, a number of other outlets, including the New York Times last week, have identified Pipes as numbering among Giuliani’s hawkish advisers, along with Norman Podhoretz and Martin Kramer.

Today, Eli Lake has a story in the New York Sun saying that Giuliani’s campaign has told him that it was angered by a “series of inaccurate articles summing up the candidate’s foreign policy brain trust as a collection of particularly hawkish neoconservatives.” Charles Hill, Giuliani’s chief foreign policy adviser, told the Sun that Pipes is not an official adviser, saying, “He is invited to send things to the campaign. We have not announced him, he has no formal role in the advising of the campaign.” Pipes told Lake, “I am not supposed to talk about this. They have not formally announced my name.”

I got the distinct sense from reading Lake’s piece that Giuliani’s campaign is simply seeking some distance, albeit artificial, from its controversial advisors. For example, Podhoretz told the Sun, “I have told a million people that I don’t speak for Giuliani. I express my views mainly through email communications to the foreign policy team. Rudy is free to accept or reject them.” In other words, he advises the campaign.

As to Pipes, I contacted him in late August and asked him if he was advising Giuliani’s campaign, as a source had told me. He denied it and so I left him off my original list of Giuliani advisors. The next day Pipes emailed again to say that he had, just that day, joined the Giuliani campaign, which is when I wrote a follow-up item saying so.

And here’s another curious thing: Just two weeks ago Pipes wrote a blistering attack on Newsweek on his blog, criticizing the magazine (rightly) for running six pictures of Giuliani’s advisors and mislabeling five of them. Pipes called it a “jaw-dropping” mistake that belonged in Guinness World Records. But he never disputed Newsweek’s identification of him as an advisor to Giuliani. Nor did he dispute that in criticizing last week’s “nasty” New York Times story.

So I guess Pipes is officially not an official advisor, or he’s an official unofficial advisor.