Wow. Law partners at firms like Skadden make tons of money, but not enough for Mr. Craig, apparently. Shocking he could be bought, and brought into a dubious arrangement that threatened not only his firm but himself, so easily.
11
I'm surprised not to hear of this case before. Let him be disbarred and join his friend in prison.
11
Sheesh! Manafort really is a piece of work, along with all the others, of course.
And if one ever wanted to see how important and influential a parent -- good or bad -- is to a child, in this case, father/daughter, look no further than how easily the Manafort offspring jumps right onto this slimy bandwagon.
Parents, either do the right thing: be the good, moral, positive role model ... or, if it's just not in your DNA (and this you know, deep down, and early on) ... simply don't reproduce. It's that clear and stark a choice.
8
“It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”
2
Shockingly poor ethics but not surprising.
My stint As a lawyer taught me there are many very honest, well intended folk and some really awful snakes practicing . In between are those that walk a ethical line of varying shades of gray.
These are the people I was more wary of than the snakes. They could become enablers to the snakes and support their perversion of the law.
This story might make a really good novel, if only it were fiction.
15
Money cannot be speech. If it is, the marketplace of ideas is merely a marketplace.
4
There is absolutely nothing surprising here. The legal field is one of the most cutthroat businesses in existence where money and power easily take precedence over ethics and morals for many attorneys. I wonder how many other "episodes" like this one have yet to see the light of day. I am curious if any of the attorneys involved here are being investigated by the licensing bodies that issued their law licenses as to their character and fitness as lawyers. Sadly, I highly doubt it.
13
I practiced law for forty years, often running up against giant ruling class law firms like Skadden, which generally represent the large corporations that had victimized my clients. The seamy shenanigans of Mr. Craig and his colleagues, all in service of the almighty buck, are par for the course with such firms. Unfortunately, behavior similar to Mr. Craig's, is not the exception but the rule. The only exceptional thing about Mr. Craig's conduct is that he got caught and prosecuted.
39
This article is not just about lawyer ethics but about money in American politics. America’s Government will continue to slide towards an Oligarch System if we don’t get money out of politics. The Citizens Decision accelerated our democratic decline by increasing 10 fold the amount of money awash in DC. A British friend is found of saying “What you Yanks call a donation we call a bribe”.
19
"Mr. Craig’s trial has supplanted any image of Washington’s elite as sage Brahmins with a vivid picture of the ruling class at its avaricious worst. ...
Where, pray tell, was that image planted and, on the assumption that it was and took root, did it really require Mr C's trial for supplanting?
"Taken together, they illustrate how lawyers, lobbyists and public relations specialists leapt onto slippery ethical slopes to cash in on a foreign government’s hopes of papering over its sordid reputation. ..."
A presumption, here, that the leaping in question was not, for very long, limited to papering over the sordid reputation of foreign governments.
3
Whenever you see a company, or in this case a government, hire a big name law firm to write a report about their malfeasance remember the the firm’s ethical duty is to the client, not the truth. The client’s crisis firm tells them to find a big name firm and pay them millions to generate a report that is at most, a slap on the wrist. Then the report is thrown in the trash. The prosecutors come in and their conclusions are completely different. So, in this case, Skadden Arps sold their reputation for $4.5 million. My old law firm refused to rent out its reputation in this way.
I worked with Skadden as co-counsel and as an adversary. I don’t dare recall in this comment even one nasty or semi-unethical act. Let’s just say that they are not white shoe lawyers in the original meaning of the term.
12
@Bathsheba Robbie: I disagree. A lawyer cannot knowingly offer perjured testimony at trial, nor can a lawyer ethically obfuscate the truth for money.
1
@Bathsheba Robie
" ... the firm’s ethical duty is to the client, not the truth. ... "
Surely there is some not insignificant duty to "the truth" however defined by fair-minded disinterested observers.
Equally surely, a report which concludes that malfeasance, also defined as above, warrants merely a slap on the wrist, presumptively breaches the duty to truth.
Mayhap that's why few give any but fig-leaf weight to reports so given
1
Like everything else it's all about the money. Nothing else really seems to matter anymore. Sad, sad, sad state of our world.
6
This article clearly illustrates why the partisan perceptions of most people posting to these sidebars (us good, them bad) is utterly misguided. President Orangutan isn't right about many things, but in this he is correct: Washington D.C. is indeed a swamp. The primary motivations of 99.9% of the "movers and shakers" in the Capital are the accumulation of wealth and influence.
10
This is exactly how things happen in Russia and the former Soviet Union. (I lived there for several years and speak Russian.)
Manafort, Craig and the compliant minons at Skadden Arps were apparently hard at work to import the Soviet sickness into the USA. Hiring a daughter with bad grades is a standard feature of their Soviet systems. I do not want to see it here.
It is high time to extirpate all this rottenness from our country right now. Throw the book at Craig, take away law licenses from cooperators at Skadden Arps, etc. Do what it takes to clean up this mess for once and for all.
19
Try him. Lock him up if he's guilty. Then find the next guy and the next guy ad infinitum until you get to Trump.
15
Perhaps I've missed it, but I don't recall seeing this story covered in The Washington Post.
5
Meh, standard fare in the world of Washington. A bipartisan sport.
2
This is not just a matter of a lawyer representing clients on both sides of the aisle; that's the nature of practicing law. No, this is a matter of suborning lies in defense of a dictator who turned snipers on his own people. The Maidan Square massacre in Kiev, in early 2014, was a horrific bloodbath orchestrated by Yanukovych, Manafort and ... at arm's length... by Craig. A peaceful protest coalesced in Kiev against Yanukovych's faithless proclamation that he was going to re-align Ukraine with Russia instead of the West. Yanukovych/Manafort/Craig's response was the literal slaughter of over a hundred citizens in downtown Kiev, with many more seriously injured by Yanukovych's Special Police, the Berkut. Any degree of assistance Craig gave to this appaling, brutal slaughter of Ukrainians is absolutely shameful.
20
It's nice to see a dad go to bat for his daughter and help her get a job!!!
2
@caplane Keeping the job is something else. Wonder if she is still there?
9
" a former White House counsel " - which White House?
1
"Trial of High-Powered Lawyer Gregory Craig Exposes Seamy Side of Washington’s Elite".......
The legal profession has always had more than its share of societal predators.......Washington is but home to the biggest nest of them.....
1
You are either ethical or unethical....there’s no gray area.
5
How interestingly ironic. Former counsels to presidents ( Trump, Obama ) may end up sharing the same cell ( Manafort, Craig ) figuratively speaking ... Drain the swamp!
5
Lawyers!
1
“Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent”. “When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas”.
A lesson Mr. Craig, with all his experience and education forgot, as profit and greed drove his decisions.
5
“Braved” slippery ethical paths?
So much for subliminal, NYT.
4
The lofty podium of the storied "White Shoe law firms" has now been toppled by base avarice and the poor judgement it breeds. It's tremendously damning that a job as a lawyer there was, essentially, bought. What's shocking to me is how these supposed deities of the legal profession thought a $4 million pay-out was worth risking the invaluable reputation of Skadden Arps. In their circle that's not a large amount of money. Tragic, pathetic and all too human.
9
l graduated NYU Law in 1978 and, after "cramming" like most new graduates, passed my New York Bar exam the first time out. Ethics was not only stressed in law school, but in my Bar interview.
I was lucky enough to practice maritime cargo law, a field with a small number of practitioners. I practiced honestly and earned a comfortable living.
My, how things have changed!
15
I worked as a Wall St lawyer for 5 years and then moved to New Orleans and worked for a major firm there for a year before leaving for greener pastures.
In NYC I generally found old school lawyers at the top of my firm who cared about ethics.
In New Orleans I found senior product liability and insurance defense lawyers who had honed subornation of perjury to an art form teaching their craft to their underlings.
High-powered smarminess in the practice of law is endemic in major firms throughout the country, where the saw “it’s not what you know it’s who you know” is the ruling principle.
61
One partner doesn’t represent the whole firm. . .except of course they do. If one partner at Skadden was capable of something like this, it makes you wonder what the others have been up to.
55
I agree with the 2 comments. These players should be held accountable with ABA investigation along with the appropriate state Bar Associations
23
@Richard
You actually thinks the ABA cares more than self-serving lip service......the winning at all costs, the selling of one's ethical soul is more the rule today than not .......
4
Could their jail cells be something other than resort-quality?
Just asking, no expectations really.
35
@FilligreeM, you really are an optimist aren't you. Jail cell!!! I'm guessing a big fine, which will be illegally covered by the firm with a golden parachute! Disbarred, and sent away to an early retirement (oh wait he's 74, not that early at all), to a 5 star resort! Would love to see a follow-up article after the verdict, and after the sentencing. Seems to me he surely should spend less time in jail than some of our poorer citizens do for traffic tickets they can not afford to pay.
4
There should also be a follow-up article on the way nepotism infects every job in the world — from academia (spouses and children of professors offered the plum jobs that those without connections can barely dream about) to businesses worldwide, including journalism, and, of course, politics and law.
35
@EM. Great idea, but if the NYT were to take this suggestion, it should be a series of articles, examining nepotism one profession at a time.
4
I recall when Mr. Craig served as Counselor at the Department of State. Eyebrows were raised at some of his antics even then.
19
'The media strategy envisioned releasing the report in advance to chosen American and European news outlets whose coverage would set the tone for others.'
Yeah. Let's have, say, Barr issue a report on the report. We did that in Ukraine, and it worked pretty well.
22
@bill, Well said. I was thinking along the exact same lines when I read that exact same sentence. But while Mr. Craig is obviously in hot water, the Republican establishment has given its blessing to AG Barr.
It's easy to see governments like the one in Ukraine as corrupt, but we can't admit when our own leaders are guilty of the same offenses. Sad. And very troubling.
5
The biggger issue to me here is that pollsters and journalists are THEMSELVES players in the politics and it's public perception that they are supposed to objectively measure and interpret for US. The media's vilification of Manafort, over years, for his dubious activities that preceded his brief work with the Trump campaign somehow avoided his extensive involvement with democrats. Republicans would have surely been in the mix more if they were in power then. The issue here is the incredible control of public perception by our media and their "empirical" sources, like pollsters. But even the uneducated public has an accurate sense of this and call it the "swamp". Whatever you call it, it is putrid.
24
@carl bumba
Oh, so the media is guilty and Manafort is just an innocent rube. Oh and whatabout the democrats. Politics and Politicians created the "swamp" not the media. You try to get us to believe that the journalists and media are the ones responsible for whatever the heck reason you're trying to campaign with, but your comment stinks in my opinion.
The issue hear is about the law which Manafort and his cronies were convicted for breaking those laws. Trying to whitewash the incident/s makes one wonder one's
real motives.
5
This sordid story is disgusting. The positive side of it is that, on the basis of press coverage, it seems likely that Craig could very will end up in jail. For how long, who knows.
In any case, a conviction will surly send a message to lawyers, lobbyists and power brokers in DC and NYC.
That message will be not to avoid shady clients, but to be more careful. Nothing will change.
29
@No Time Flat
"a conviction will surly send a message to lawyers, lobbyists and power brokers in DC and NYC."
It will send a message to everyone who expects to get caught, ie, no one.
And rest assured that any attention this issue raises on Fox News will emphasize solely and exclusively the Obama connection. Gotta put something on the other side of the balance beam.
16
There was a time when law was a profession, and one's duty to client and society were considered more important than self-enrichment. Over time, I've seen that principle steadily erode. After 40 years as a lawyer, I can safely but sadly say that the "profession" is no longer anything of the kind.
Firms like Skadden and men like Craig need to be brought to account but are more symptom than cause. We have lost sight of our common good; sacrificed it on the altar of self, and we are now, as a profession and as a society, paying the price.
99
The same could be said about any profession from finance to high tech (think Theranos), but I suspect that it was never true. Those who become very wealthy most often do so at the expense of ethics. Meanwhile, the ethical hard workers still exist. They just don’t make headlines.
39
@Slacker They don't make partner, either.
6
@Richard C: I mark the change from a profession to a business as the early seventies when law schools offered upgraded degrees from Bachelor of Laws to Doctor of Jurisprudence ($25, please). Since then, it’s been a race for the money in the large firms.
There are thousands of ethical lawyers still practicing law as a profession. It is a shame that we have been besmirched by this cadre of “business” lawyers.
2
This is a classic tale. Legal training emphasizes the ability to find a rationale for a desired outcome. The culture of law practice encourages the use of semantic and conceptual gymnastics. The status symbol of a healthy financial reward in Washington D.C., a city that until recently engaged in at least the pretense of public service for its own sake, completes the picture.
80
@A Boston
Loopholes is the name of the game in today's legal profession......
4