For those who don’t remember this creep, let’s talk about attorney Greg Craig… A class 1 Clintonista. Deb Heine at PJM:
During the Clinton years, Craig was involved in a plethora of Clinton scandals, including the violent Florida government raid in 2000 that resulted in young Elian Gonzalez being sent back to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
As the lawyer for Elian Gonzalez’s father, Craig worked with the communist Cuban government by killing an agreement “to transfer custody of Elian to his father, as long as [Elian’s family from Miami] could live with the boy and his father in an environment free of U.S. and Cuban officials.”
Pre-Clinton and Obama, Craig was involved in other notorious cases.
In the early 1980s, [Craig] was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley’s acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith.
… Craig orchestrated a 1984 [Senate] hearing for Kennedy on alleged human-rights abuses committed by Nicaragua’s rebels, the Contras. He worked with groups closely tied to the Sandinista regime to find witnesses for the forum, which led to a round of anti-contra news coverage in the U.S.
Okay now that you’ve got the picture, let’s look what’s happening currently:
Former Obama White House counsel and Clinton impeachment attorney Greg Craig may soon be indicted by the Justice Department for engaging in illegal unregistered overseas lobbying, Fox News reported Tuesday. Craig appears to have been caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-running investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
If charged, Craig would be the first Democrat to face prosecution in Mueller’s Russia probe, according to Fox.
The case centers on lobbying work that Craig performed in 2012 for the Russian-backed president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, while Craig was a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Craig allegedly never registered as a foreign agent under a U.S. law known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires lobbyists to declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders, governments or their political parties.
FARA violations were only rarely prosecuted until Mueller took aim at Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, for his lobbying work in Ukraine. Manafort, who connected Craig with Yanukovych, has been convicted on numerous bank and tax fraud charges, and was separately accused of FARA violations as well. He was sentenced earlier this month to approximately seven years in prison.
Craig left Skadden last April after Alex van der Zwaan, who had been a lawyer in the firm’s London office, pleaded guilty to lying to prosecutors and the FBI about communications involving Skadden’s work for Yanukovych, whose party was paying Paul Manafort and Rich Gates.
Skadden agreed to cooperate with the DOJ’s registration requirements in January, and paid $4.6 million in a settlement to avoid criminal prosecution.
If they do get around to charging this guy, it’s my view he deserves everything he gets… But I can’t help but wonder, does he constitute the token Democrat target of the Mueller investigation… The Democrat that they added at the last moment so that they could say “See? We weren’t just going after Republican Targets”
Time, I suppose, will tell, but I’m betting he won’t be treated like Elian Gonzalez, and Rodger Stone. We won’t see the FBI showing up with half of their arsenal at his doorstep, and I can pretty much guarantee you that they’re not going to have a CNN camera crew in tow.
