Larry Craig and Lawyers

There's the old adage that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. And there's the rejoinder that a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. That certainly seems the case with Larry Craig. Leaving aside all of the sexual hypocrisy of his case, the seeming entrapment of it all, whether placing a cop in a toilet all day is the best deployment of our law enforcement resources and the hysterical fact that all Republicans will have to go past said bathroom to attend the GOP convention in Minneapolis this summer, there's the hypocrisy of law and order Republican Larry Craig now looking for every possible technicality to get out of his guilty plea. If the rest of us ever needed an object lesson on why it's good to get a lawyer, this is it. No lawyer would have let Craig cop a plea. But scared, he pled without consulting an attorney. Now he's trying to take it back and probably won't be able to.

One of the smartest things I did in the CIA leak case was to get my own lawyer, Dick Sauber, the white collar defense lawyer at Fried Frank Harris and Shriver. If I sound like a shill, it's because I'm a believer in him and a believer that everyone should get a lawyer if you're faced with more than a traffic ticket. I'd advise any journalist facing a disclosure-of-sources case to get their own lawyer, separate from their corporation. Larry Craig's tortured life is his own but his lesson is universal. When in doubt, get a lawyer.