Prosecutors say that ambition was a key part of Greg Craig’s motive to mislead the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images Legal Skadden official describes Greg Craig’s reluctance to register as foreign agent

Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel, adamantly resisted registering as a foreign agent for his Ukraine-related work, citing concerns that doing so could complicate efforts by him or others to go to work for the U.S. government in the future, a senior partner at Craig’s former law firm testified Monday.

Skadden Arps general counsel Lawrence Spiegel testified that Craig, who’s facing a criminal charge of trying to deceive the Justice Department about his work, was unusually emphatic as he argued internally that Skadden personnel should not be required to file as foreign agents for its project investigating the trial of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine.


“He said it could have consequences for him and, potentially, others on the team if the firm registered as a foreign agent,” Spiegel said, recounting a September 2013 conversation with Craig about a letter from the Justice Department saying the firm needed to register. “He said something about the Obama pledge or conflict policy, but that if we registered it would bar him and potentially others on the team from going into the government for, I think he said, two years.”

“What was Mr. Craig’s tone in this conversation, if you recall?” prosecutor Molly Gaston asked.

“He was very strongly advocating that we were right and they got it wrong. That’s what I remember,” Spiegel added.

Prosecutors say that ambition was a key part of Craig’s motive to mislead the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, but the defense seemed to embrace Craig’s agitation on the subject.

“It’s fair to say he was pretty passionate?” defense attorney William Taylor asked, during a two-minute cross-examination that followed nearly an hour of questions from Gaston.

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“I would say he was very passionate in his view,” Spiegel replied.

The defense’s contention previewed during opening arguments in the case is that Craig — a veteran trial lawyer with extensive experience at the highest levels of government — was so “hot” over the Justice Department’s stance that he fired off an email to Spiegel that contained several inaccuracies about the firm’s handling of media contacts about the Tymoshenko report and the firm’s coordination with Ukraine’s public relations team.

Prosecutors contend that those same misstatements and omissions became part of Craig’s presentation to the Justice Department’s FARA unit the following month.

It’s unclear what future jobs Craig might have wanted to preserve his viability for, but one of Craig’s main Skadden colleagues on the Ukraine project, Cliff Sloan, left the firm in June 2013 amid the department’s inquiry. Sloan spent a year and a half at the State Department as the Obama administration’s envoy for closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.

A retroactive FARA filing by Skadden could have complicated or even scuttled Sloan’s appointment.

The testimony on Monday came as Craig’s trial, entering its third week, showed signs of coming to a close. Prosecutors told U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson that they were done calling witnesses and were likely to formally rest their case on Tuesday.

Craig will take the stand in his own defense, one of his lawyers told the judge on Monday afternoon. Jackson also gave the defense the go-ahead to call four character witnesses for Craig in the coming days. It remains unclear whether closing arguments will take place late this week or after Labor Day.

Earlier Monday, jurors heard from the key government official Craig is charged with misleading, Heather Hunt. Hunt has worked in the Justice Department’s FARA unit for more than 35 years and served as its chief from about 2002 to earlier this year.

Hunt explained how Craig’s work came under scrutiny, initially because of a Los Angeles Times article that included a quote from the report.

Hunt said one particular claim her office found curious was the assertion in an agreement Skadden had with Ukraine about the project that the retainer was for the equivalent of about $12,000 in Ukrainian currency.

“It was quite a bit of work involved for $12,000. So, it was something we were looking at,” she said. “All of that was important to trying to determine the different foreign principals involved. It was basically going to who was behind this whole effort.”

Hunt and Spiegel also both recalled an event key to the charge against Craig — a meeting on Oct. 9, 2013, that Skadden requested to try to get the Justice Department to reverse course in its drive to make the firm register as a foreign agent. Prosecutors say that at that in-person exchange, which took place in a partially shuttered federal building in Washington during a government shutdown, Craig lied to and misled the department’s FARA team.

“They wanted to make clear to us that all the communications they had with the media were done independently,” Hunt recalled. “Mr. Craig did most of the talking. It was that any contact that he had with the press … was done on his own, to correct mischaracterizations that were made, that were reported about his work product this report on Tymoshenko case. … That was my takeaway from the meeting: He did it on his own and not at the request or under the direction or control of Ukraine.”

Spiegel’s recollection was more vague. He said he remembered FARA personnel asking “detailed questions to try to poke and probe whether what we were saying in terms of not being an agent and [being] reactive and corrective.”

“I don’t remember anything being said that was inconsistent with our understanding going in, which is that we were not an agent, we were reacting to outreach to us and that we were making corrections,” Spiegel added.

The defense has repeatedly made clear to jurors that no notes appear to exist of the meeting and that no one can recall precisely what Craig said. Prosecutors sought to head that off by getting Hunt to acknowledge in her testimony that no notes were found.

“When I’m at a meeting like this I talk, I don’t write. Otherwise I’d be looking down all the time and I wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation and honestly listen to what they’re saying,” Hunt said.

After nearly two hours on the stand for the prosecution, Hunt faced a pointed cross-examination by defense attorney William Taylor, who portrayed her office’s inquiry into Craig’s work as perfunctory and oddly blinkered.

Taylor also suggested that much of the information prosecutors are accusing Craig of concealing could have been obtained if Hunt or her staff had simply asked Craig directly.

For instance, Taylor noted that while the FARA unit’s first inquiry to Skadden was triggered by the Los Angeles Times article, the office seemed to have been entirely unaware for almost half a year of other major news accounts about the Tymoshenko report. Among them is a New York Times article that Craig generated by providing an advance copy of the report to Times reporter David Sanger, an action at the heart of the government’s case.

“I only needed one article to raise the question, and the L.A. Times for me was sufficient so I can open up a dialogue,” Hunt said.

“Mrs. Hunt, just answer my question. The only media you had at this time was the Los Angeles Times?” Taylor asked

“I most likely read other articles about it, but I don’t recall,” Hunt said.

Prosecutors have accused Craig of concealing his role in getting the report to Sanger and of lying about the timing of those contacts, but Craig’s attorneys have noted that the Times article makes clear that Craig spoke to the newspaper in advance of the report’s public release.

“The article says that,” Hunt acknowledged.

Taylor showed Hunt one of her own notes proposing to ask Craig who distributed the report other than the law firm, a question the Justice Department did not ask directly in a follow-up letter. The defense lawyer also noted that the FARA team asked Skadden what dealings it had with two U.S. public relations firms involved in pro-Ukraine work, but never asked an open-ended question about what P.R. firms it did deal with.

Prosecutors have suggested Craig should have disclosed that he did have several interactions with a firm Ukraine retained to handle the rollout of the report, FTI Consulting.

“You could have asked, I suppose, any question you wanted about the report in the letter, could you not have?” Taylor asked.

“I could have,” Hunt replied.

While prosecutors have accused Craig of telling outright falsehoods, much of the case appears to turn on the extent of his obligation to disclose everything potentially relevant to the Justice Department inquiry.

With jurors outside the courtroom on Monday afternoon, the judge asked both sides in the case to submit more written arguments on that point and to specify what they believed Craig did or did not have a duty to disclose.

“What is the source of the defendant’s duty to offer up that fact … ? What was it that obligated him to offer that up in the context of the responses to these inquiries?” Jackson asked.

She sounded a bit skeptical of some of the defense’s arguments that Craig’s carefully worded responses were literally true and therefore couldn’t support the charge he faces of concealing material facts from the government. “I’m having a little difficulty dancing on the head of that pin,” she said.

In March of this year, the Justice Department named a prosecutor who’d worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, Brandon Van Grack, to oversee the FARA unit. Hunt was given a new title, senior counsel for FARA registration.

The shift installed a new layer of supervision over FARA and was interpreted by some observers as an implicit critique of the foreign-agent office for having been too passive in the past.

However, when Hunt was asked by prosecutor Jason McCullough Monday whether she liked the new role, she answered affirmatively.

“I do very much,” she said.

Van Grack, who was in court for part of the Craig trial last week, was not seen as Hunt testified Monday.

In January of this year, Skadden filed a retroactive FARA registration for its work on the Ukraine project. Under a deal designed to stave off enforcement action against the firm, it agreed to step up its compliance efforts and to pay the government $4.6 million — the net amount of fees and expenses Skadden took in for the Ukraine work.

Both the prosecution and Craig’s attorneys agreed not to discuss the Skadden settlement at Craig’s trial.