Posted on 05/23/2008 9:59:09 AM PDT by OnRightOnLeftCoast
An attorney and top foreign policy adviser to Sen. Barack Obama is coming under fire for representing controversial figures, including an accused human rights abuser, an alleged murderer of a U.S. soldier and even the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan. Greg Craig, who has been termed the "lawyer of the left," represented John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate Reagan in 1981 by firing six bullets at the president as he left a hotel. Craig was reportedly the architect of Hinckley's successful defense in which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, even though reports by the federal prosecution found Hinckley sane.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
he eas also a Clinton lawyer during impeachment, if I recall correctly.
From Wikipedia:
“Greg Craig also represented the Cuban father of Elián González during the 2000 child custody dispute that ended in the forcible seizure by U.S. Marshals of Elián González from the Miami, Florida home of his relatives.
Attorney Craig represented United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan during the Volker Commission’s investigations in 2004 surrounding the Oil-for-Food Programme scandal.
Most recently, he has been representing Pedro Miguel González Pinzón, a Panamanian legislator who is wanted in the United States for the murder, in 1992, of a U.S. Army soldier and the attempted murder of another. The Dallas Morning News called on Senator Obama to ask Mr. Craig to choose between the campaign and involvement in the case.”
I think I just threw up in my mouth. Since when did this country fall in love with people who hate this country? We need a clean sweep of people like Obama and his ilk out of our schools and universities and courtrooms NOW.
Disturbing details about Pedro Miguel González Pinzón, whom Greg Craig is representing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Miguel_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Pinz%C3%B3n
It’s just such an amazing coincidence how all of these hardcore anti-American leftists keep showing up within Obama’s orbit.
Your in good company. Many folks are asking the same question:
In an earlier Obama posting today a band played at an Obama rally in Portland, OR. The group usually plays the old Soviet national anthem at other concerts.:
The band 'Decembrists" are listed on O's website by name of each member - not the name of the band!
To: Westbrook
<< This is an emerging pattern. The Che Guevera flag at an Obama campaign HQ. The refusal to wear a flag on his lapel. Refusal to hold his hand over his heart during the National Anthem. “Rev.” Jeremiah Wright Billy Ayers And now an openly pro-communist band at his biggest rally. These are all WAY TOO MUCH to be mere coincidences. >> ================================================== Another coincidence you left out:
Raila Odinga is Obama's cousin.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/af...
Odinga recently became co-Prez of Kenya;
Both belong to the same Kenyan tribe. He was educated in communist E. Germany, and his father, Oginga Odinga led the communist opposition during the Cold War.
You just can't make up stuff this good... >>
You got a point. It has a nice Oringa to it!
I have never thought much about this, but has there ever been any conspiracy theories about Reagan getting shot?
While the enemy is crawling towards the White House, too many here are still busy to trash McCain.
“has there ever been any conspiracy theories about Reagan getting shot?”
Most people know he was shot by John Hinckley Jr., but he was also shot in the shoulder by Roy Hinckley. Fact.
Reagan appeared in the movie Law & Order where he was shot by Russell Johnson, who later played Professor Roy Hinckley in Gilligan’s Island. Some say it’s a coincidence, but that’s what they WANT you to believe!
I agree but Lots of Luck. Obama is a gift that keeps on giving. Hope the MSM is on this—NOT.
Greg Craig
In 2000, Mr. Craig successfully represented Elian Gonzalez’s father, Mr. Juan Miguel Gonzalez (we all know he was representing Castro not Elian’s father).
I wonder how the Cuban Americans in Florida are going to like that when they find out?
******
few know Craig’s curious background: anti-war protester, defender of John Hinckley Jr., adviser to Ted Kennedy
During his student days at Harvard University, Craig led the anti-war movement. At Yale Law School, he met the Clintons.
In the mid-1980s he advised liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on such controversies as the war in El Salvador.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose him as director of policy planning, a key position at the State Department.
He coordinated policy on Tibet – a highly sensitive issue, especially because Clinton met twice with Chinese leaders.
Before the House Judiciary Committee, Craig said Clinton might have done wrong but did not break the law. In a notorious statement, he said Clinton’s testimony in the Paula Jones case was “evasive, incomplete, misleading, even maddening” but not perjury.
******
To Sen. Patrick Leahy, Craig was an obvious choice for an attorney for Juan Miguel Gonzalez (Elian’s father).
Master of media manipulation
The mainstream news media have lapped up Craig’s message: Elian should be with his father; the Miami relatives are violating the law and using Elian.
“He achieved the result his client wanted by deploying a public-relations strategy as well as a legal strategy,” said attorney Ronald Weich, also a former Kennedy staffer.
Cuba’s Useful Idiot
By Humberto Fontova
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, April 16, 2008
“The questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by attorney Gregory Craig,” continues Pedro Porro.
Clinton crony Gregory Craig, you might recall, flush from his fame getting Bill Clinton off the Lewinsky rap, was at the time acting as Juan Miguel’s (read Fidel Castro’s) attorney.
Last month Dan Rather’s new gig as host of HDNET’s “Dan Rather Reports” found him, as so often during his CBS days, “reporting” from Cuba. From Dan we heard of “dramatic changes” down there, of a “remarkable transformation.” “The door (to the U.S.) is open, “explained Dan. “The best time to talk is now.”
Dan was chanting a familiar tune, one we’ve heard almost nonstop from the MSM’s pet “Cuba Experts’” for the past 21 months.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=CDFF92A9-356B-4570-9EB1-788C712DA236
snip
Here’s what America didn’t see:
“Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro Security men the entire time he was in the studio with Rather.” This is an eye-witness account from Pedro Porro, who served as Dan Rather’s translator during the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece whereupon Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily-guarded father.
“Juan Miguel was never completely alone,” says Porro. “He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious to me that he was under heavy coercion. I probably should have walked out. But I’d been hired by CBS in good faith and I didn’t know exactly how the interview would be edited — how it would come across on the screen.”
“The questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by attorney Gregory Craig,” continues Pedro Porro. Clinton crony Gregory Craig, you might recall, flush from his fame getting Bill Clinton off the Lewinsky rap, was at the time acting as Juan Miguel’s (read Fidel Castro’s) attorney.
“It was obvious that Craig and Rather where on very friendly terms,” says Porro. “They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified. Craig was stage managing the whole thing — almost like a movie director. The taping would stop and he’d walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper, say something into his ear. Then Rather would read the next question into my earpiece straight from the paper.”
Midway through watching that “60 Minutes” broadcast, “I felt like throwing up,” said Porro. “My stomach was in a knot.” His worst fears were confirmed.
More at the link above...
May 8, 2000
Who took the pictures of a happy Elian and his father? The father’s $850-per-hour lawyer, Greg Craig. (Craig had written to the major news media, calling on them not to cover the raid at all in the name of “decency.”) Notwithstanding the attorney general’s embrace of openness and the free press, no reporter would be allowed to photograph the pair. The Air Force base, outside Washington, was closed to everyone–including, somehow, U.S. senators–in the interests of family privacy and healing.
Who stands to benefit if Fidel Castro is handed a huge propaganda victory with the repatriation of Elian and his father to Cuba? One beneficiary would seem to be Dwayne Andreas, former chairman of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies. Thom White Wolf Fassett, the head of the United Methodist Church lobbying office in Washington, says Andreas recruited Craig to represent Juan Miguel. As Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy writes, Fassett is a longtime advocate of normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations.
Fassett flew to Cuba in March with Joan Brown Campbell, former head of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and a Castro apologist. On his return, Fassett’s agency, says Tooley, created a Humanitarian Advocacy Fund to raise money for legal fees associated with Juan Miguel Gonzalez’ attempts to reclaim his son. The initial goal was to raise between $50,000 and $100,000. Fassett promised that no church money would go to the fund. After protests from within the church, the money was transferred to the NCC.
But the Shareholders Watch Committee, a small group of disgruntled ADM stockholders, alleges that ADM and Dwayne Andreas were instrumental in retaining Craig. The committee also alleges that Andreas donated $10,000 to the United Methodist Humanitarian Advocacy Fund, which ADM denies.
Whether the charge is true, Craig’s law firm, Williams and Connally, does legal work for ADM. The president of the National Council of Churches, former Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, serves on ADM’s board. Andreas is a major contributor to Florida’s Barry University, where Elian’s meeting with his visiting grandmothers took place. Andreas’ wife formerly chaired the school’s board of trustees.
These cozy relations could lead to big business for ADM in Cuba if sanctions are ended. Andreas, along with Campbell, Fassett and dozens of other church leaders, met with Castro in New York five years ago to discuss strategies for ending trade sanctions against Cuba. And couldn’t President Clinton — who, it is speculated, wants to lift these sanctions as part of his presidential legacy — end up with some sort of sweet deal in his post-White House years from those American companies salivating to do business in Cuba?
The same people who claim Pres. Bush is taking away our liberties didn’t have a problem with jack booted thugs armed with machine guns returning Elian to Castro or Janet Reno burning down a ranch in Waco...I doubt with Greg Craig as Obama’s adviser we are going to get much ‘change’ from the Clinton years if Obama gets elected.
******
The negotiations between the Miami relatives and the Justice Department were making progress and were in good faith. This has now been confirmed by innumerable news organizations as well as several very Clinton- and Reno-friendly muckety-mucks who were party to the negotiations. This was not — as the craven liars at the Justice Department would have you think — an issue of the Miami family “moving the goal posts.” Ultimately, it was an issue of Greg Craig — a private attorney taking orders from a murderous dictator — ordering an assault on a peaceful home without a proper warrant (see today’s fantastic WSJ op-ed page for more).
Here is how the current issue of Newsweek recounts the “final straw” moment of the negotiations:
“Craig summoned Juan Miguel from a dinner party in the suburbs, and the two men scrutinized the proposal. To Craig, there were too many sticking points. The agreement to turn over custody of Elián to Juan Miguel was not unconditional. As Craig read the plan, the psychologists picked by the agreed-upon panel had the power to give Elián back to Lázaro and Marisleysis if they saw fit. Craig also balked at the time frame for the joint living arrangement, which could be as long as two months. One week was acceptable to Juan Miguel. No more. Juan Miguel also objected to the location. The father wanted the boy to come to Washington. He did not want to go to the chaos of Miami.”
In effect, Craig was in the luxurious position of being able to reject any negotiated settlement because he knew that the Justice Department, would do his bidding, and the White House and its lapdogs in the media would blame the Miami family for the resulting raid.
That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be drawbacks to the raid. Reno and Co. say that the troops went into the Gonzalez home loaded for World War Three because they had reason to believe there were guns on the premises. So the eight submachine-gun-carrying men had to be prepared to return fire in a small Miami bungalow amidst screaming, tear gas, and chaos, with a six-year-old child on the premises, possibly hiding out of sight of the shooters but not out of the path of the bullets.
He represented his former boss, Senator Edward Kennedy, during the 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith.
Attorney Craig represented United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan during the Volker Commission’s investigations in 2004 surrounding the Oil-for-Food Programme scandal.
Most recently, he has been representing Pedro Miguel González Pinzón, a Panamanian legislator who is wanted in the United States for the murder, in 1992, of a U.S. Army soldier and the attempted murder of another. The Dallas Morning News called on Senator Obama to ask Mr. Craig to choose between the campaign and involvement in the case. Attorney Craig had previously represented the Government of Panamá during the 1990 trial of Gen. Manuel Noriega and had sought the return to Panamá’s treasury of funds stolen by Noriega.
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