Editor’s note: It has been reported that Gregory Craig will serve as Barack Obama’s White House counsel. This profile of Craig appeared in the May 22, 2000, issue of National Review.

‘Elian is in an atmosphere that is psychologically abusive. . . . He is in imminent danger to his physical as well as emotional and mental health,” declared Gregory Craig, the lawyer for Elian Gonzalez’s father, during a Nightline appearance on April 19. A little more than two days later, Elian really was in imminent danger: Federal agents smashed in the door of his house and stuck a gun in his six-year-old face.

Within hours of the event, a credulous Craig was telling reporters that Elian wasn’t “in any way terrorized, frightened, traumatized, or otherwise troubled” by the experience. What a remarkable transformation — from horrific abuse to utter serenity. In fact, said Craig, the wee lad was “a strong boy.” It seems that he could withstand a nighttime raid of his home, but not the affections of his cousin, Marisleysis. (Craig is apparently laying the legal groundwork for lawsuits against the Miami family.)

Elian even took part in a tender scene with federal agents, said Craig. In a post-seizure CNN interview, the lawyer described a “very warm moment” between the boy and Janet Reno’s big lugs: “I must say, there was a very touching moment in the room when the INS agents — the six- foot-two guys came in, 250 pounds came in. . . . And they were saying goodbye, and they [were] saying how proud they had been to be able to reunite this family. And that’s something. I mean, these are non-emotional, non-sentimental people.” (Unlike, of course, those hysterical Cuban Americans.)

Greg Craig is many things — a high-powered D.C. lawyer, a Clinton intimate who led the president’s impeachment defense, a silver-haired golden boy. But there’s one thing he wants people to know above all: He’s an innocent. In 1998, Craig slipped to the Washington Post a copy of a recommendation written for him as a part of his Harvard application. “This young man is Adam before the Fall,” remarked his Exeter history teacher. Craig, reported the Post, acknowledged the description “with a chuckle.” He commented about himself: “Still wide-eyed, still idealistic, still innocent.”

Wide-eyed, idealistic, and innocent. That’s roughly what GOP Senate staffers thought of Craig in the 1980s, when he was an aide to Ted Kennedy. And they didn’t mean it as a compliment. In fact, they thought he was a dupe.

Craig orchestrated a 1984 hearing for Kennedy on alleged human-rights abuses committed by Nicaragua’s rebels, the Contras. He worked with groups closely tied to the Sandinista regime to find witnesses for the forum, which led to a round of anti-contra news coverage in the U.S. Soon afterward, however, Joshua Muravchik, currently of the American Enterprise Institute, exposed a fraud: The most compelling witnesses — three Miskito Indians — had been served up by the Sandinistas.

And a fourth participant, Father Alfredo Gundrum, an American priest living in Nicaragua, had been asked to play the role of honest broker — to place the testimony “into some kind of perspective,” as Kennedy put it. Gundrum, described as “totally apolitical” in background material distributed by Kennedy’s staff, told of how the Contras launched vicious raids on Indian villages “almost every day.” Yet Gundrum had been the subject of a San Francisco newspaper article just one month before the hearing. He was photographed standing before his church with a Soviet-made rifle in his hands and quoted as saying, “To me it was a day of grace the day the Sandinistas took over, and I really mean it.”

After Muravchik’s report ran in The New Republic, Craig gave the author a call. “He was very embarrassed by the whole thing,” says Muravchik. “I was persuaded that he didn’t know this was a put-up job.”

And then came repentance, of a sort. Craig flew to Nicaragua on a bipartisan fact-finding mission that included an investigation into some of the claims made at the hearing he had staged. “He was shocked by some of what he saw-shallow graves and torture chambers run by the Sandinistas,” says Joel Lisker, a Republican Senate staffer on the trip. Craig wound up contributing to a report that acknowledged the Sandinistas’ “insensitive and inhumane” treatment of Nicaraguan Indians.

The 55-year-old Craig first made a name for himself as an antiwar protester at Harvard, where his statements frequently made their way into the press. Later, at Yale Law School, he got to know a woman named Hillary Rodham, and then her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. They weren’t close, but when Craig graduated he turned over his apartment to the future First Couple, who lived together before marrying. “If you had asked our classmates which of us would become president, most of them would have picked Greg before Clinton,” says Michael Medved, who was a pal of Craig’s at Yale.

Craig did have an early brush with the presidency, albeit a creepy one. In the early 1980s, he was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley’s acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith.

But Craig’s real moment in the sun, before Elian, came in 1998, when Clinton tapped him to fend off impeachment. “It is shocking, and it’s terribly wrong what he did,” Craig said of Clinton. But the president certainly wasn’t a perjurer. After the Senate refused to boot Clinton, Craig won plenty of credit as savior.

He then returned to his old perch at Williams & Connolly, the well-heeled Washington law firm. When Cuba’s allies started casting around for a lawyer to represent Elian’s father, Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont urged Joan Brown Campbell, formerly of the National Council of Churches, to pick Craig. Leahy not only saw Craig in action at Clinton’s Senate trial, but also knew his father, who once ran for governor of Vermont.

The deal was done. An arm of the United Methodist Church says it’s about halfway to raising $100,000 for Craig’s fees. That’s probably money well spent, from the Left’s perspective. Accounts of pre-raid negotiations between Elian’s Miami relatives and the Justice Depart ment suggest that Reno wasn’t trying to bring peace to the warring Gonzalez family so much as taking orders straight from Craig. It appears that the Miami Gonzalezes had agreed to transfer custody of Elian to his father, as long as they could live with the boy and his father in an environment free of U.S. and Cuban officials. These negotiations dragged on through Good Friday and into the next morning, with Craig reviewing documents in his office past 2:00 A.M. — and ultimately vetoing the proposed settlement.

For weeks he’d been saying that the government should grab Elian from his relatives “immediately.” That night, Craig got his wish. He would later tell the New York Times, “We were, as far as I can tell, never close to an agreement.” That’s an odd claim following a sleepless night of negotiations. The Justice Department was on the phone to the Gonzalez house in Miami at the very moment its agents burst in.

Since then, Craig has been all smiles. But throughout his public life — Harvard antiwar protester, Hinckley defender, Sandinista collaborator, Palm Beach rape-trial adviser, anti-impeachment ringmaster, and now counsel to Fidel Castro — there’s one thing Craig has never been: innocent.