Greg Craig, former White House counsel to former President Barack Obama, looked directly at the jury Wednesday as he delivered the denials that kicked off his testimony. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo Legal Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig takes the stand in his criminal trial

Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel, took the stand in his own defense on Wednesday, making a high-stakes move to blunt the government’s criminal case charging that he deliberately misled the Justice Department about his work on a legal project for the government of Ukraine seven years ago.

The prosecution of the veteran Washington attorney and trial lawyer is an outgrowth of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 Trump campaign. That probe brought an intense spotlight on the foreign dealings of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was a top adviser to Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, and played a key role in retaining Craig to write a report about the trial of Yanukovych’s chief rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.


Mueller’s scrutiny of Manafort led prosecutors to dig into Craig’s 2012 work and his responses to a Justice Department inquiry about whether he and his law firm at the time, Skadden Arps, needed to register as foreign agents for Ukraine in connection with the Tymoshenko project.

In April, a grand jury indicted Craig on two felony charges for allegedly misleading the department’s Foreign Agent Registration Act unit about his Ukraine-related dealings. A judge dismissed one of those counts earlier this month, but ordered Craig to stand trial on a single charge of scheming to conceal material facts from federal officials.

Within minutes of being sworn in Wednesday, Craig, 74, denied the core allegation in the case: that he lied to and misled the head of the FARA unit, Heather Hunt.

“I did not lie to Ms. Hunt or the members of the FARA Unit,” Craig said, under questioning from defense attorney William Taylor. “I did not withhold or conceal any information from the FARA Unit.”

Craig, wearing a gray suit and blue tie, looked directly at the jury as he delivered the denials that kicked off his testimony. Jurors looked on intently, with one man leaning forward in his chair to get a good look at the defendant. Craig seemed a bit tense, but laughed on a couple of occasions, including when asked to spell his name, which has been ubiquitous at the trial.

While Craig was adamant that he had not deceived Justice Department officials, later in his testimony he conceded that he relayed inaccurate information to Skadden colleagues regarding his dealings with journalists about the report.

In response to a September 2013 letter from Hunt stating that Skadden needed to register, Craig sent an email to the firm’s general counsel, Larry Spiegel. The message, which opened with the phrase “just for the record,” said three media outlets reached out to Skadden to get the report because they couldn’t get it from the Ukrainian government. Craig’s email also said he had not contacted the media.

In response to questions from Taylor, Craig said both answers were mistaken.

“It was not fully accurate with respect to The New York Times, because we were contacting them and asking if they were interested,” Craig said.

“Do you know why you got it wrong?” Taylor asked.

“Why’d I get it wrong? I just muddled it up. I had not done a review of those emails,” Craig said, referring to his contacts with journalists the previous December.

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Craig also acknowledged “the same kind of inaccuracies” in a longer draft letter he prepared for the Justice Department. The firm decided not to send the letter and instead sought a meeting with the department.

However, prosecutors say the email and the draft letter reflected the same false and misleading messages Craig had already sent to Hunt and would continue to deliver thereafter.

Many of Taylor’s questions seemed intended to take the sting out of Craig’s anticipated cross-examination by the prosecution.

That inoculation effort was somewhat successful, but when prosecutor Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez took over, he seemed to put a significant dent in the defense’s attempt to bolster Craig’s upstanding reputation. The concerted defense case on that point featured four character witnesses on Tuesday who testified that, for decades, Craig’s honesty and integrity have been impeccable.

Campoamor quickly drew jurors’ attention to a letter, contract and invoice signed by Craig in August 2012 that appeared to add $1.25 million to the token $12,000 that Ukraine’s government originally agreed to pay for the Skadden work.

The prosecutor contended that not only did Craig include a series of falsehoods in the contracting documents, but that he did so to help Ukraine’s government deal with swirling media questions about the funding for the Skadden report, which was secretly underwritten with $4.1 million from a Ukrainian steel magnate, Viktor Pinchuk.

“This is about creating a new contract that will help Ukraine in its public relations nightmare that is the ‘Skadden Stink,’” Campoamor said, referring to an unflattering editorial that had appeared on the subject in the English-language Kyiv Post.

Craig maintained that the request for $1.25 million was to cover charges that were still piling up.

“It’s about creating a new contract that will help the overrun in connection with expenses and fees,” Craig said.

But Campoamor noted that Craig’s letter referred to “services rendered” and that Skadden still had money on hand from Pinchuk.

“Sir, there were no outstanding payments due as of the date of this letter, correct?” Campoamor asked.

“We have not sent an invoice for outstanding — with a charge? No,” Craig replied, adding later, “At that moment, there were not.”

“Yet your letter on Skadden’s letterhead says that there were. … That’s a lie,” Campoamor declared.

“It’s not accurate,” Craig acknowledged.

During opening statements two weeks ago, Taylor seemed to concede that Craig’s actions surrounding the invoice — which was being sought by Manafort — were problematic.

“Mr. Craig will be the first to tell you … he could be rightly criticized for signing it,” Taylor said then, calling the funding request “exaggerated.”

Craig spent about three hours being questioned by the defense before a nearly two-hour grilling by Campoamor. The defendant’s cross-examination is expected to continue on Thursday morning, with closing statements not likely until after Labor Day.

Near the outset of the prosecution’s questioning on Tuesday, Campoamor pressed Craig about an October 2017 interview he did with lawyers and FBI agents from Mueller’s team. Citing a so-called FBI 302 report on the interview, the prosecutor said Craig conceded there that he reached out to New York Times reporter David Sanger “pursuant” to a media plan prepared by Ukraine’s public relations advisers.

“I don’t want to argue with you with you, Mr. Campoamor, but that’s not what the 302 says,” Craig said.

“I’m happy to read it, so everybody can see what it says,” the prosecutor offered. However, FBI interview reports are typically not admissible and the judge would not permit it. The report, filed publicly with the court in June, says Craig admitted to contacting Sanger as indicated in the media plan, but does not say that was the reason he did it.

It also emerged during Craig’s testimony that he had met a Russian-Ukrainian aide to Manafort suspected of ties to Russian intelligence, Konstantin Kilimnik, well before encountering Kilimnik in connection with the Tymoshenko project.

“I think I’d met him a year or two before,” Craig said. “We were pursuing another engagement in Ukraine, and Mr. Kilimnik was involved in trying to set up meetings with some government officials.” He did not elaborate, although jurors were shown an email that Craig sent to Manafort calling Kilimnik “wonderful.”

During the defense questioning earlier Wednesday, Taylor queried Craig on another issue that has been central to the trial: whether Craig and Skadden should have registered as foreign agents for Ukraine as a result of their work related to the report. Prosecutors say such a registration was required, but Craig is not directly charged in the case with failing to register.

Craig insisted on Wednesday that his view was and is that he did not need to register because his contacts with the media were done to advance his and his law firm’s interests, not Ukraine’s.

“I did not think it crossed the line,” Craig said. “I did not think any of those contacts made me a press agent or agent for Ukraine. … I was defending the integrity of our report.”

Prosecutors have shown jurors an email Craig sent to Sanger saying that Ukraine wanted him to get a first look at the report. Despite that, Craig claimed that in delivering the report to Sanger, he was not acting on behalf of the former Soviet republic.

“I made a point of saying … that Ukraine made that determination, not me,” Craig said. “I did not want David to think that I was looking for a favor here.”

Craig said he offered to drop the report off at The Times’ Washington bureau, but Sanger suggested that Craig bring it to Sanger’s home, which is near Craig’s in Northwest Washington.

Taylor asked Craig about testimony from a British public relations representative for Ukraine, Jonathan Hawker, that handing the report over to Sanger was intended to kick off a media and political outreach campaign aimed at burnishing the image of the Ukrainian government and undercutting criticism from Tymoshenko’s camp.

“It may have been, but that was not the reason I was calling Mr. Sanger,” Craig said. He did say he reached out to Sanger to head off Hawker doing the same, because he did not trust the FTI Consulting staffer to accurately characterize the report.

Prosecutors contend that Craig intentionally misled the Justice Department in a June 2013 letter when he mentioned contacts with the media one and two days after he delivered the report to Sanger. Drafts of the letter obtained from Skadden show that the dates at one point were changed to cover the date of actual delivery, Dec. 11, 2012, then changed back.

The prosecution says Craig was trying to conceal his delivery of the report to Sanger, but Craig said the dates were an error — one that he regrets.

“I think I used those dates because they referred to the dates of the articles,” the longtime D.C. lawyer said. “It should have included the 11th. … Going back and reviewing it, I wish we’d put December 11 in there rather than December 12.”

Prosecutors have argued that Craig did not want to register because it could affect his career or those of others on his team. Under defense questioning, he acknowledged that concern, but also said that registering as an agent for Ukraine would have undercut perceptions that the Tymoshenko report was independent.

“I had been White House counsel. … If people had served as foreign agents, they had to wait two years before they could be considered for appointments in the administration. It was an attempt to reduce the perception that people were going in and out of government for their own benefit and their own profit,” Craig explained.

“I’d had high positions in government and was less concerned about myself, although that policy would’ve affected, but there were other people on my teams that would have been adversely affected if they had to register as foreign agents,” the veteran Washington attorney said.

Craig noted that two attorneys who worked on the report, Clifford Sloan and Allon Kedem, did later join the government.

Before detailing the career concerns, Craig said he worried that registering as foreign agents would also be a credibility problem for the report.

“If we also registered as an agent for Ukraine at the same time we were writing this report, that was saying we could not do this independently,” he said. “It’s sort of a Catch-22. If you register, that means you’re a foreign agent under the direction of a foreign sovereign.”

Craig seemed a bit stiff at the outset of defense questioning, but looked more comfortable as the process wore on. While lawyers argued privately at the bench, he left the witness stand and leaned against the courtroom wall not far from the jury.

The former White House official grew heated and emphatic at only one point: when Taylor asked him about a claim that the Skadden report found Tymoshenko produced no evidence to support her allegations that she was being persecuted. That assertion appeared in a “messaging” document sent to him from Hawker, the British P.R. specialist, who testified earlier in the trial.

“That’s a flat-out lie about our report,” Craig shouted. “We never said that. I was very angry.”

Craig then launched into an attack on Hawker. “If I suspected Jonathan Hawker would lie about this…” Craig said, stopping after the judge cut him off.

“I understand you have passionate feelings about all of this,” the judge said, before telling Craig to wait for a question from Taylor rather than giving freeform statements.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Craig said.

While Mueller’s probe targeted a variety of individuals in President Donald Trump’s orbit, Craig is the only Democratic political appointee to face charges in a case stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.

Craig is accused of lying to or misleading investigators about a variety of facts related to the Ukraine project, but the central focus has been on whether he sought to obscure his role in orchestrating initial press coverage of his report and, in particular, an initial New York Times story detailing the findings of the Skadden team.

Prosecutors say Craig’s evasions were driven in part by his reluctance to expose the true cost of the Ukrainian report and the source of the money for that work, Pinchuk.

However, emails shown at the trial indicate Craig favored disclosing Pinchuk’s identity early in the project, even suggesting to Manafort that he “out” the wealthy Ukrainian with or without his consent.

Craig’s turn on the witness stand came after about two weeks of testimony, much of it from Craig’s former colleagues at Skadden Arps and others who worked on a public relations plan for the rollout of the firm’s report.

Manafort, who is serving a seven-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence for tax and bank fraud, as well as conspiring to evade the foreign-agent-registration law in connection with Craig’s Ukraine project, did not testify at Craig’s trial.

However, Manafort’s former right-hand man, Rick Gates, did testify, describing a few interactions with Craig about the report, including a rollout-related meeting that Manafort, Gates, Craig and others attended at the Harvard Club in New York in September 2012. Gates is cooperating with prosecutors as he awaits sentencing on conspiracy and false-statement charges brought by Mueller’s office.

Craig faces a maximum potential sentence of five years in prison if convicted, but most defendants are sentenced under federal guidelines that typically call for more lenient punishment, particularly for offenders with no prior criminal record.

Probation is a possible sentence if the jury of nine men and three women convicts Craig, although other defendants who pleaded guilty to a similar charge in Mueller-related cases got short prison terms.

