Alabama attorney Jill Simpson, best known as a Republican whistleblower in the Siegelman case, says White House Counsel Greg Craig has a conflict in matters involving Rove and perhaps other Bush administration officials.
In an exclusive story at Locust Fork News-Journal, Glynn Wilson reports that Craig has been asked to step down as White House counsel, at least in "all matters related to the Bush administration."
Priscilla Black Duncan, Simpson's Montgomery-based attorney, writes in a letter dated February 22 that the Rules of Professional Conduct require Craig to step aside from discussions about executive privilege and other issues connected to the Bush administration.
What is Craig's conflict? Wilson reports:
In what appears to be a clear conflict of interest, Craig represented Rove in his recent book deal, while Craig’s law partner, close associate and mentor, Emmet Flood, is representing Bush in executive privilege matters before the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals, where Bush administration officials have been charged with the political firings of U.S. attorneys for failing to act on orders to prosecute Democrats prior to elections.
But the most alarming sign of a conflict for Craig comes from this:
Furthermore, Craig had been in contact with Ms. Simpson on the pretense of possibly representing her in her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee legal team a year and a half ago, but declined to represent her only after getting her to reveal her entire case against Mr. Rove.
In her letter, Duncan notes the serious nature of Craig's interactions with Simpson:
“You had a duty to disclose your relationship with Rove to Ms. Simpson before she revealed the details of her involvement, because you knew from initial contacts that you had a conflict,” Duncan writes in the letter. “You have a duty now to turn over any material relating to disclosure of that information as well as to allocute to whom you passed the knowledge.”
You can read the full text of Duncan's letter at Locust Fork News-Journal.
3 comments:
He's a mole. He needs to go, sans law license.
He could be a mole. Before Bush left office, he installed many of his political appointees into career positions. They had been partisans since way back in Reagan or even Nixon days, then all of a sudden, like a born again Christian, they "saw the light" and decided that the "evil ways" of politics isn't for them anymore. Now they proclaim that they need a "stable career position" to help pay the bills even though many of them are already millionaires or independently wealthy. It's all BULLSHIT! They are spies and it works both ways:
When I arrived at The Alabama Conservation Department in 2003 several of Siegelman's political appointees had been "red shirted" into career positions and Republican Commissioner Barnett Lawley was constantly engaged in a power struggle with Siegelman's people. Anytime Lawley pissed off the tidewater gentry from Mobile and Baldwin Counties, former Commissioner Riley Boykin Smith would call his people and give them instructions to sabotage Lawley. My paranoid supervisor James Hillman Griggs was too stupid to figure that out that I wasn't in on it. I wasn't working for either faction. Like I told him, I'm a libertarian socialist and don't care about the Republicratic Party's clammor to enrich the bankers and take a kickback. I was just trying to follow instructions without breaking the law. Government is full of paranoid idiots who will sell each other out for a dollar and arrest their own mother for a title.
Greg Craig was in the Clinton adminsitration--can't remember whether or not he was in the same position as he is now or just a "roving" ambassador.
Craig is the prototypical Washington insider/fixer--bags of money, doesn't really need the work, has the patina (or the corrosion) of a white-shoe law firm, etc.
Like all of these folks, left morality behind decades ago. Everthing is strictly business. Nothing personal. Just like the mob.
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