Former White House Counsel Greg Craig. legal Prosecutor urges jury to find that Greg Craig tried to fool Justice officials

Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig sought to fool Justice Department officials in order to avoid registering as a foreign agent for his work on a Ukraine-related project in 2012, prosecutors argued Tuesday to a jury preparing to consider whether to convict Craig on a felony false-statement charge.

Prosecutor Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez declared that Craig was so intent on not exposing the details of how he was commissioned and paid to write a report for Ukraine’s government on the controversial trial of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko that he decided to see if he could deceive Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act office when it inquired about the project.


“This man, Gregory B. Craig, had a choice to make,” Campoamor said, pointing at the defendant. “He took a gamble. He gambled that nobody would ever learn what he had done. He gambled that the folks in the FARA unit would take his word for it. And they did.”

However, Craig’s defense stressed that prosecutors were asking the jury to believe that Craig was essentially willing to throw away a reputation built over half a century.

“Mr. Craig is not the kind of person who would lie to a U.S. government agency, not after a 50-year career based on character and trust,” Defense Attorney William Murphy said. “What value does 50 years of a life well lived have in the scales of justice as you weigh the evidence? I suggest to you that it weighs a lot.”

Murphy also blasted the prosecution’s case as resting on the testimony of admitted liars and crippled by the absence from the witness stand of key players in the saga, like Paul Manafort, the infamous international political consultant and Trump campaign chairman who helped commission and roll out Craig’s Ukraine-related report, and New York Times reporter David Sanger, whom Craig gave an early look at the review.

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“Where was Manafort? Where’s David Sanger?” Murphy asked.

Prosecutors did call Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates and British public relations consultant Jonathan Hawker to testify that—contrary to Craig’s denials—his handoff of the report to Sanger was part of Ukraine’s broader media plan.

But Murphy savaged the men he described as the prosecution‘s “star witnesses,” blasting Gates as “a congenital liar” and slamming Hawker as “an occupational liar.”

There was a decidedly defensive tone to the outset of the prosecution’s argument, with the prosecutor quickly trying to reassure jurors that the trial — which entered its fourth week Tuesday — is a worthy endeavor despite the fact that Craig is only charged with being misleading and not with failing to register as a foreign agent or some more grave offense.

“Do not be mistaken. It matters,” Campoamor insisted. “That’s information that’s important for the American public, for our legislators and people in government to make decisions…. Don’t let the defense get up here and tell you this is a case merely about words as if this case doesn’t matter. It does.”

The prosecutor also seemed to go out of his way to draw attention to how closely Craig worked with Manafort, who some jurors have expressed disdain for.

“Manafort was the main point of contact. They were the two generals,” Campoamor said.

But Campoamor also sought to ward off doubts about the credibility of figures like Gates and Hawker and the absence of other potential witnesses by stressing that prosecutors believe that, standing alone, the emails introduced in the case are enough to convict Craig of scheming to bamboozle the government.

“The witnesses here are just providing the context for some of the documents. You have it in black and white,” Campoamor argued. “It is a crime to conceal. It is a crime to carefully craft your answers, so that when you read them together, they don’t even make sense or are misleading or would lead you to believe something else?….That, ladies and gentlemen, is a crime.”

Murphy was about halfway into his two-hour presentation to the jury before he offered up one of the defense’s most strained contentions: a claim that when Craig told the Justice Department he distributed the report only “in response to requests from the media,” he was not lying because Sanger asked to look at a copy after Craig offered him one.

“Did he push the report on Sanger?” Murphy asked, noting that Craig’s email asked Sanger if he was interested in the review and whether he had time to look it over.

“Mr. Sanger says, yeah, I’d like to get a copy,” Murphy said. “Ladies & gentlemen, that is a truthful statement. Mr. Sanger requested a copy of the report. In fact, he requested it twice.”

When prosecutor Jason McCullough rose to deliver a final, impassioned pitch to the jury, he angrily dismissed the defense’s position as an exercise in sophistry.

As McCullough lit into the defense, he used TV monitors in the courtroom and jury box to display Craig’s email to Sanger below a graphic featuring the words: “This is NOT a ‘request from the media.”

“That is a lie — a lie!” McCullough exclaimed. “This is a false statement.”

McCullough also argued emphatically that Craig’s dealings with the New York Times must have been at Ukraine’s bidding because a Ukrainian steel tubing magnate, Viktor Pinchuk, had paid $4 million for the project. The prosecutor also suggested that Craig had compromised himself from the outset of what was billed as an independent review.

“Show me the money,” the prosecutor shouted. “He’s spending 4 million to do this. He’s under the control of Ukraine….. He cares about the fact that Ukraine gets what it paid for.”

Craig is the only appointee of a Democratic administration to be charged in the cases stemming from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller probed the Ukraine project because it was orchestrated in part by Manafort, who was a top adviser to Tymoshenko’s rival, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Manafort eventually admitted to conspiring to evade the foreign-agent law in connection with Craig’s project and others. He’s serving a seven-and-a-half year prison term on various charges. Prosecutors said in a court filing that they concluded they could not “sponsor” Manafort’s testimony in Craig’s case.

The probe into Craig and the law firm where he worked from leaving the Obama White House until last year, Skadden Arps, was eventually handed off to prosecutors in New York. Skadden settled with the government and escaped charges by retroactively registering and paying the U.S. Treasury the net amount the firm took in for the Tymoshenko report: $4.6 million. The investigation was then sent back to Washington and assigned to the prosecution team now handling Craig’s trial.

The jury of nine men and three women is set to begin deliberating Wednesday morning, following a reading of formal jury instructions by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Under a schedule Jackson set at the outset of the case, no deliberations are expected Thursday or Friday, so jurors are likely to return Monday if they don’t reach a verdict by Wednesday afternoon.

The jury heard from 16 prosecution witnesses, including Gates, who testified for the first time since appearing at Manafort’s trial in Virginia a year ago and is awaiting sentencing on a pair of felony charges he pleaded guilty to. The defense called Craig and five others, including four character witnesses who attested to Craig’s outstanding reputation.

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Before jurors were brought in Tuesday, the defense and prosecution spent more than two hours haggling over jury instructions in the case.

Craig’s attorneys have argued that he had no legal obligation to be complete or thorough in his answers to queries from Justice’s foreign-agent unit and that there were no specific limits on what he could leave out when trying to persuade officials to reverse a determination that Skadden needed to register as a foreign agent for its Ukraine-related work.

Jackson did not go as far as the defense sought, but did agree that Craig did not have an open-ended duty to reveal everything about his Ukraine project or provide all the information that would have been required in a FARA filing, like full details about the payment arrangements for the work.

Craig was indicted in April on two counts: scheming to conceal material facts from federal officials and submitting a false or misleading report under FARA. The judge dropped the latter charge last month, ruling that it was unclear whether that specific provision — aimed at FARA filings — applied to a letter arguing someone should not have to register under FARA.

Craig faces a maximum potential sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 if convicted on the remaining count, but most defendants are sentenced under federal guidelines that typically call for more lenient punishment, particularly for offenders with no prior criminal record.

The judge would not be required to sentence Craig to prison time, but other defendants who pleaded guilty to a similar charge in Mueller-related cases — including a junior Skadden lawyer on the Ukraine project — got short prison terms.

Jurors seemed attentive as they heard the 90-minute lead-off argument from Campoamor, followed by two hours from Murphy and an additional 30 minutes from McCullough.

McCullough closed his argument by displaying, over a defense objection, a rudimentary image of a puzzle with two missing pieces. He told jurors that they could still discern what was shown even with a few pieces missing.

“It’s missing a couple pieces and it’s frustrating,” the prosecutor said. “Do not get distracted by all of the other things that we’ve gone through that might be interesting to know.”

A steady stream of friends and family members have been in court to support Craig during the trial. Among them for the crucial closing arguments Tuesday was David Kendall, a longtime attorney for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Kendall and Craig were former law partners at Williams & Connolly and worked closely together defending President Clinton from impeachment.

During breaks in the arguments Tuesday, Craig chatted with some of his well-wishers in the gallery. He also received an enthusiastic hug from Murphy just after the defense lawyer wound up his lengthy oration to the jury with a plea to “restore Greg Craig to his colleagues, his family, and his friends and salvage his reputation.”

At least two members of Mueller’s team were also on hand for the pivotal court session Tuesday: prosecutor Adam Jed and a key FBI agent in the prosecution against Manafort, Brock Domin.



