In naming a new White House counsel, President Obama is replacing one Democratic Party insider with another Democratic Party insider.
Gregory F. Craig, who resigned from the post as of Jan. 3., will be succeeded by Robert F. Bauer, Obama’s personal lawyer and an expert on election law and campaign finance.
Craig attended Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton and was part of the legal team that advised Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings. He also was a lawyer on the staffs of Sen. Edward Kennedy and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
He joined the Obama campaign early and seemed a natural for the counsel’s post. But during his year in office he took heat for several actions including the administration’s handling of the decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
“Craig’s critics said he failed to anticipate the wave of criticism in Congress,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen in Politico. Part of that criticism focused on the issue of where the prisoners would be held in the United States.
Bauer, who is a partner in the Washington office of Perkins Coie LLP, has a connection, at least once removed, to the debate over the detaining of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo.
On a pro bono basis, Perkins Coie lawyers were part of the defense team that successfully represented Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden’s personal driver, on terrorism charges.
The team’s efforts led to a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that the military tribunals set up to handle Guantanamo cases were unconstitutional.
However, a 2008 news release from Perkins Coie does not mention Bauer and credits other lawyers at the firm for their work on the case.
A 1976 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, Bauer was general counsel to former Sen. Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign. He held a similar position with Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
According to an April 2009 interview in Law.com, Bauer met Obama, a Perkins Coie client, in January 2005 when Obama was beginning his term as a senator from Illinois.
Later, when Obama decided to run for the presidency, Bauer became the campaign’s general counsel.
During the campaign, Bauer advised Obama not to accept public financing and the spending limits it entailed, a decision that upset advocates of election reform.
After the election, he became the president’s personal lawyer. He is also the general counsel of the Democratic National Committee.
Bauer is married to Anita Dunn, the interim White House communications director who is moving to a part-time consultant role in the administration.
Last year, Bauer and Dunn were named to Newsweek’s list of the top 10 global power couples.
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