Froomkin concerned about the White House counsel

From Dan Froomkin:

The White House counsel ideally serves as the president's conscience. But late last year, Barack Obama's conscience was surgically removed. Greg Craig, as Obama's top lawyer, was the point man on a number of hot-button issues, the fieriest being how to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Craig argued for holding fast to the principles that Obama outlined before he became president, regardless of the immediate political consequences -- an idealistic approach that, in a White House filled with increasingly pusillanimous pragmatists, earned him some powerful enemies. ... He was replaced by Robert Bauer, a politically adept consummate Washington insider whose expertise is in campaign finance law -- in short, a man whose job is to win elections, not defend principles. [...]

But decisions about whom the government should prosecute -- and how -- are precisely the kind that shouldn't be made on political grounds. The American justice system is supposed to transcend partisanship, and be beyond the realm of political horsetrading. There are limits to how much the White House should do when it comes to interfering with the Justice Department -- limits that, unfortunately, every modern president seems to push. And with Bauer serving in Craig's place, the pushback is lacking.

Even White House officials don't disagree that Bauer, who was general counsel for Obama's presidential campaign and chief counsel at the Democratic National Committee, is taking a fundamentally different approach to the job than his predecessor did.

Craig was undeniably opinionated. By contrast, a White House spokesperson told HuffPost: "Bob does not approach the position of White House counsel advocating for a particular set of policy preferences. He thinks that his role as counsel is to give the best legal advice available to the president and to other staff members in the White House."

So he doesn't stake out a position and defend it? "The White House counsel's office has not developed under Bauer a policy recommendation," the spokesperson said. "In the context of any pending legal question or pending policy, what they've done is to outline a range of options given their reading of the opportunities."

The White House did not make Bauer available for comment. And Craig declined several interview requests. But Craig's friends are horrified. Bauer is "becoming a validator and an enabler, rather than someone on the president's staff who keeps him out of trouble," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

What Craig did was to try to keep Obama true to his campaign rhetoric about reversing the extremist legal views of the previous administration. "To Greg Craig, that was a defining characteristic of what the Obama administration was supposed to be about," Clemons said. "He ended up being the guy who kept pulling Obama toward his own moral and legal and political commitments."