Will Obama Lawyer Get the Manafort Treatment?

According to his lawyers, former Obama White house counsel Greg Craig could be facing federal charges for failing to register as a foreign agent. The potential case against Mr. Craig comes from special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation into Russian collusion, which turned up evidence that the well-connected lawyer performed lobbying work in 2012 for the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, but didn’t register as a foreign agent in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

We’ve known this since January, of course. The question has been, as Liberty Nation’s Joe Schaeffer put it: “Will Craig be facing a stiff jail sentence soon? Or is that a punishment only meted out to former Trump campaign officials in an attempt to get them to incriminate the president?”

The Real Crime

As LN’s Graham J. Noble explained, the real crime – in the eyes of the left – is that Donald Trump became president. Anyone who had anything to do with it must pay, no matter what it takes to make that happen. This is why Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, got seven and a half years for failing to register as a foreign agent and then lying about it. Keep in mind that this was the exact same fiasco that resulted in Craig’s law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, merely paying a fine.

In 2012, Craig and Skadden were hired by the Ukrainian government to work up a report on the prosecution of a former Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. The former PM was the political opponent of the country’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian backed president was supposedly a long-time patron of Manafort, which is what led Mueller to Craig and the firm.

The report was allegedly independent, but critics call it a whitewashing of a politically motivated prosecution. In a settlement earlier this year, Skadden admitted both to participating in a public relations campaign to spread the report and to being paid far more than the $12,000 initially reported – $4.6 million, in fact.

Though Craig’s attorneys have denied that their client ever actively lobbied for the foreign nation and claim that he is innocent of all charges – as is their job – the settlement and the evidence that led to it don’t exactly paint a pretty picture for the career Democrat lawyer.

What’s Good for the Goose …

There’s an old saying that rings true in this situation: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. What this means, of course, is that if Paul Manafort deserves prison time for advocating for the 2012 “independent” report on the prosecution of Tymoshenko and neglecting to register as a foreign agent under FARA, then so does Craig – especially if both men then lied about it later.

A common theme throughout the Russiagate investigations has been that the deeper we dig in search of dirt on Trump, the more tarnished Democrats and leftist operatives we turn up – yet still they are tossed aside in the quest for the perfect gem of Trump’s guilt. Could it be that it’s time to start prosecuting some Dems? Perhaps – and it looks like Attorney General William Barr is finally getting down to business.