Following up on David’s post below on what Craig ‘did’, I have to imagine this was one of those catch-22s that Craig really had no way out of. I’m going to assume for the sake of the discussion that the gestures Craig is described as making are ones easily recognizable as soliciting sex. The rubbed shoe (see police report) seems unambiguous to me. With that assumption, it’s still clear that the whole thing didn’t get far enough for Craig to ‘do’ anything lewd. But I’m not sure that matters since obviously you can get hauled off to jail for agreeing to purchase sex from a prostitute even before things get freaky.
Given what’s described, it seems quite possible that, with a good lawyer, Craig could have beaten the rap.
But had he tried, it would have become public and it would have been pretty clear — clear enough to doom him politically — that Craig is gay and that he gets sex in public restrooms. (If someone put their shoe under a bathroom divider and rubbed it against your shoe, you’d get the message I think.) Remember, there’d already been lots of unconfirmed reports in the past. Because of that, Craig couldn’t fight the charge even though he might well have been acquitted. But once he pled guilty, it really wasn’t a he said/he said, as his press spokesman said yesterday. Craig had said under oath that he was guilty of the charge.
One way or another, once he was arrested, the apparent facts, even if you think they aren’t ones for which you should be criminally culpable, were ones that were not compatible with his continuing in public office — given his politics and the state he represents. All he could do was plead out and hope against hope that no one ever noticed.
