Bob Bauer To Replace Craig, Republicans Challenge His Credentials

Bob Bauer's credentials challenged


Incoming White House counsel Bob Bauer is widely respected as a skilled and pugnacious lawyer and has the unquestioned trust of President Barack Obama’s inner circle and a deep knowledge of the ways of Washington.

But the announcement Friday that he will take the place of Greg Craig, which had been rumored for weeks, nonetheless prompted questions about whether his experience as a campaign law expert and partisan warrior is appropriate for a job dealing with some of the most sensitive constitutional and national security issues in government.

Republicans moved quickly to cast Bauer, a veteran Democratic campaign attorney with limited government experience, as “hyperpartisan”, with a former White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan calling the pick “troubling.”

Government watchdogs, who for years battled Bauer over their efforts to reduce the role of money in politics, winced at the appointment, fearing it would steer Obama further away from as-yet-unfulfilled promises to bolster a campaign finance regime under attack from the right.

Even some Democrats privately questioned whether Bauer’s relatively specialized background and confrontational style are well-suited to a post that requires both a familiarity with a wide range of sensitive legal issues — from national security to habeas corpus to military law — and finesse in dealing with stakeholders outside the White House.

The White House dismissed all concerns about Bauer, pointing out that he is well-regarded by Republicans in the tight-knit election law community and that he has worked on issues outside of election law.

“He has represented large institutional clients on major issues like employment and contract, IP [intellectual property], tax and privacy issues,” said an administration official who did not want to be identified talking about Bauer’s qualifications for the post, which the White House said would he would assume by the end of the year.

The White House also highlighted Bauer’s work in 1999 as an outside lawyer to then-Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle during the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

In a statement, Obama called Bauer “a trusted counselor for many years to many elected officials” who is “known as a tough and widely respected advocate … Bob is well-positioned to lead the counsel’s office as it addresses a wide variety of responsibilities, including managing the large amount of litigation the administration inherited, identifying judicial nominees for the federal courts and assuring that White House officials continue to be held to the highest legal and ethical standards.”

Bauer’s ability to take advantage of the expertise of other smart lawyers will serve him well in the counsel’s office, said Marc Elias, a Bauer protégé who will take over from his mentor as head of the political law group at their law firm, Perkins Coie, when Bauer leaves.

“The White House counsel’s job is about managing a law firm within the White House as much as anything else,” said Elias. “And Bob has been involved in law firm management for years. He has built the political law group here.”

Past holders of the White House counsel’s job have come from all manner of backgrounds. Craig’s résumé included defending high-profile clients in criminal cases as well as serving as a foreign policy adviser to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. President George W. Bush’s first counsel, Alberto Gonzalez, had been Texas’s secretary of state and a state supreme court justice.

But Bauer’s expertise is almost entirely in political law – including lobbying, campaign finance and ethics – and he is perhaps the leading attorney in that competitive and well-paying field.

A 1976 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, he built the political law practice at Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based law firm, into a powerhouse, hiring and grooming some of the top lawyers in town.

Today, the firm has a near-stranglehold on some of the biggest Democratic political accounts in town; it represents the party’s two congressional committees — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — as well as the individual campaigns and political action committees of many Senate Democrats.

And Bauer landed the mother of all accounts — Obama’s presidential campaign — even before the campaign officially began, which led to his being appointed this year to the coveted position of lead counsel for the Democratic National Committee, a position that also made him the lawyer for Obama’s political network, Organizing for America.

Plus, he represents Obama and his family in personal matters, such as the federal investigation of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Bauer will have to sell his partnership in the firm to take the counsel’s job. But his replacement as the lead lawyer for the DNC, the Obama presidential campaign and the Obama family, will be another protégé, Perkins Coie partner Judy Corley, making it likely Bauer would be able to reclaim the accounts if he returned to private practice before Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

“Everyone has their own background and their own experiences, and Bob clearly comes from an election law background,” said Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who deliberated over many cases involving Bauer’s clients, before Toner left the commission to start his own election law practice representing mostly Republican candidates and causes.

“But if people are trying to say that Bob Bauer is not qualified to be White House counsel, I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t know a harder-working, brighter lawyer in Washington, D.C., than Bob Bauer. He is a lawyer’s lawyer.”

But Peter Wallison, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s counsel in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Contra scandal, asserted Bauer’s background is not a good fit for the White House counsel.

“I think it’s troubling,” Wallison said. “It is very important that the White House counsel have political instincts. One of the things you want to be able to tell the president is whether an idea is politically feasible to accomplish within current law. What will the informed legal community accept as a legal explanation for what you are doing? You have to have political skills of some kind, but you also have to be a lawyer who is interested and devoted the maintenance of the rule of law.”

Richard Cullen, a former U.S. Attorney and Virginia state Attorney General who was appointed to both positions by Republicans, compared Bauer’s qualifications to those of top GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who was counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 election and in the Florida recount, and also was the top lawyer for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“Can you imagine if Bush picked Ben Ginsburg [for White House counsel]?” he said (Ginsberg, incidentally, told POLITICO the White House is “lucky to have” Bauer as counsel). Though Cullen praised Bauer as “a fine guy and a very good lawyer,” he said “his practice is limited to representing only Democratic special interests. I would feel the same way about the office if a Republican president picked a Republican activist to run it. It’s the White House counsel’s office. It’s not the president's.”

A former high-ranking White House official from a previous Democratic administration who worked closely with the counsel’s office asserted that being counsel “is the wrong job for the kind of lawyer that he is.” The former official, who has known Bauer for 20 years and has worked with him on occasion, said Bauer isn’t good at predicting how decisions will play with the public and the press — a skill highly valued in Obama’s inner circle.

“The best White House counsels are people who come out of politics who understand the importance of dealing with the media. He’s got to be able to articulate the decisions of the White House counsel’s office to the press,” said the former official, who think Craig’s inability to adequately do so caused him problems in the White House. “Bob Bauer is politically tone deaf. It’s just a train wreck waiting to happen. If they were trying to avoid what happened with poor Greg Craig, they went the exact opposite direction.”

Bauer, who declined to answer questions for this story, is known among reporters for aggressively pushing back when he disagrees with their premise but has become increasingly leery about talking to the press as he’s ascended in Obama world.

His tactics did raise eyebrows during the 2008 campaign, when he transcended the traditional lawyer role, becoming a strategist of sorts who played a visible role in some key campaign story lines.

He explained Obama’s broken promise to participate in a public finance system by asserting that the lead lawyer for Republican John McCain was unwilling to negotiate the terms of such an arrangement (an account McCain’s lawyer flatly rejected), and Bauer famously ambushed a press conference call held by Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign to challenge her campaign’s accusations that Obama supporters violated caucus rules.

But unlike Craig, Bauer is a bona fide member of Obama’s inner circle. He has represented Obama on political matters since 2005. And his wife is outgoing White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. The power couple met through Democratic politics, married in 1993 and live with their 13-year-old son Stephen and two cats — Kinsey, an orange tabby, and Sticky, a white part-Siamese — in Chevy Chase.

Bauer’s policy influence within the Obama orbit further worries advocates of stricter campaign finance rules, who had considered Obama a kindred spirit but have become dissatisfied with his inaction on some of their key issues.

“Bob Bauer has a long track record of opposing campaign finance reform, so that is a concern,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the nonprofit group Public Citizen who has urged Obama to fulfill a campaign promise to support an overhaul of the presidential public financing system.

In a 2005 post on his well-read blog, Bauer suggested efforts to fix the system face tough prospects because public “support is needed and not forthcoming.”

And until a few years ago, Bauer had been a vocal critic of certain efforts to restrict political spending. In fact, a case he brought in 2005 on behalf of EMILY’s List recently resulted in a sweeping federal court ruling that experts predict could pave the way for a flood of new 527 spending that could target Obama in his 2012 reelection campaign.

“I admire his character and his aggressiveness,” said Holman. “It’s just that throughout most of my relationship with him, that aggressiveness has been focused on undermining real reforms of money in politics. However, since he’s become Obama’s lawyer, he’s moderated his viewpoints on ethics and campaign finance reform, so we’ll have to see how it plays out in the end.”


Sources: Politico