Some might find it off-putting that the “most ethical administration ever” (or is that the Congress?) would see its White House counsel Greg Craig representing the administration’s juiciest and most fortuitous target, Goldman Sachs. How can this happen? Politico reports:

“A former White House employee cannot appear before any unit of the Executive Office of the President on behalf of any client for 2 years—one year under federal law and another year under the pledge pursuant to the January 2009 ethics E0,” said a White House official.

The official also said that the White House had no contact with the SEC on the Goldman Sachs case. “The SEC by law is an independent agency that does not coordinate with the White House any part of their enforcement actions.”

Well how do we know there was no coordination? In fact, the entire Goldman strategy is that this was a political set-up from the very beginning:

An attempt to discredit the Securities and Exchange Commission by painting the case as tainted by politics because it was announced just as President Barack Obama was ramping up his push for financial regulatory reform, including a planned trip to New York on Thursday.

“The charges were brought in a manner calculated to achieve maximum impact at point of penetration,” a Goldman executive said.

Among the points Greg Palm, co-general counsel, plans to emphasize on the call is “how out of the ordinary the process was with the SEC,” the executive said. The SEC usually gives firms a chance to settle such charges before they are made public. Goldman executives say they had no such chance, and learned about the filing while watching CNBC.

So if the White House was meddling, or doing so with intermediaries, and this is central to Goldman’s defense, what is Craig doing litigating against the U.S. government?