I am a lawyer, not a lobbyist. Goldman Sachs has hired me as a lawyer — to provide legal advice and to assist in its legal representation — and that is what I am doing.
– Greg Craig, former White House Counsel and now a partner at Skadden, explaining why he is not bound by the president’s ethics policy barring former White House officials from lobbying for two years after leaving office.
Gregory Craig
* Discovery in the Pennsylvania spycam case turns up thousands of screen shots and web cam photos of Lower Merion youngsters. [Threat Level/Wired]
* Goldman Sachs taps former White House counsel Greg Craig — now at Skadden — for its SEC defense team. [Politico]
* Bryan Cave’s James M. Cole may be tapped to serve as deputy attorney general. A DOJ veteran, he would also bring to the position white collar defense experience and a 1970s ‘stache. [Propublica]
* Supreme Court denies Charles Hood’s request for review of his death penalty case. That would be the case where the judge and the prosecutor used to sleep together. [Associated Press]
* Meet the Pope’s lawyer. [Associated Press]
* Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones beg New York judge for leniency. [New York Daily News]
* Happy birthday, Justice Stevens. [Associated Press via ABA Journal]
In November, Gregory Craig announced that he was leaving the White House for private practice. President Obama’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, was named as the new White House counsel.
In his resignation letter, Craig said that he would return to private practice “as of January 3, 2010.” At the time, we speculated that he might return to Williams & Connolly, the firm that had employed him since law school graduation. But today, W&C made it known to its associates that Craig would not be returning as a partner there.
Instead, he’ll be going to Skadden Arps. From an email sent out by Williams & Connolly senior partner Brendan Sullivan:
Greg Craig will not return to W&C as a litigator. Instead he has been invited to join Skadden to head a group which will focus on advising clients in need of public policy analysis.
Full email after the jump.
Update: Also after the jump, WSJ Law Blog sheds light on why Craig chose Skadden.
The rumors circulated back in August, but now it looks like it’s finally happening. From Marc Ambinder, shortly before 11 on Thursday night:
Sources in government say that White House Counsel Gregory Craig has decided to resign, and that the president’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer, will take his place. A formal announcement is slated next week, though word might drop tomorrow.
Looks like that announcement is getting sped up. More after the jump.
UPDATE: Greg Craig’s resignation letter, also after the jump.
Continue reading “Musical Chairs: Greg Craig Out as White House Counsel, Bob Bauer In”
Last night, the Wall Street Journal (subscription) sent out a news alert claiming that President Obama’s White House counsel, Gregory Craig, is getting kicked to the curb:
Obama administration officials are holding discussions that could result in White House counsel Gregory Craig leaving his post, following a rocky tenure, people familiar with the matter said.
The WSJ implies that Craig — a former Williams & Connolly partner, perhaps best known for extracting President Clinton from the impeachment mess — has botched advising the President on several national-security issues, including the Guantanamo prison closure, the release of national-security documents from the Bush era, and detainee holdings.
But the White House says ‘whoa, whoa, settle down now.’
Continue reading “Is White House Counsel Gregory Craig Getting Played in a Washington Parlor Game?”
Now it’s time for a post about one of our favorite subjects: the magnificent Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. First, check out what’s currently gracing the front page of the Drudge Report:
The audio clip is pretty awesome. To listen, click here.
Second, we’d like to take this opportunity to chastise any and all lawyers who enjoyed top government posts during the Clinton Administration, but now refuse to support Senator Clinton in her bid for the White House.
Here are two prominent examples. With apologies to Stephen Colbert, who isn’t exactly a Hillary supporter, a “Wag of the Finger” to:
Craig is doing this despite his close personal ties to the Clintons; the fact that he held multiple posts in the Clinton Administration, at the White House and State Department; and the alma mater he shares with the Clintons (Yale Law School — rival to Obama’s Harvard Law).
Whatever happened to gratitude? To loyalty? To standing by your friends? Apparently there is no honor among thieves — or, for that matter, political fund-raisers.
Messrs. Craig and Johnson, you may live to regret your decisions. After Senator Clinton tramples “Obambi” in the Democratic primaries, you may try to get back into her good graces. But Senator Clinton has a long memory. And you have placed yourselves on the wrong side of it.
We hope you enjoy private practice. — ’cause you shouldn’t expect a return to government anytime soon.
Kentucky Fried Hillary [iFilm]
Clinton ally, a Washington superlawyer, switches allegiance to back Obama [Chicago Sun-Times]
In Clinton’s Backyard, It’s Open Season as an Obama Fund-Raiser Lines Up Donors [New York Times]
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
Keep reading »
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