The indictment of Gregory B. Craig, President Obama’s first White House Counsel, shows that while Robert Mueller’s investigation may be over, its effects continue to ripple outward across the nation’s capital. Paul Manafort’s prosecution was a wake-up call for Washington lobbyists, and Craig’s indictment is sounding the alarm for attorneys in a town full of them.



The case involves violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), the 1938 law designed to prevent covert foreign influence that was more honored in the breach until Mueller came along. Now, Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, is headed off to prison for violating FARA during his lucrative years working for Ukraine’s president. And Craig, one of Washington’s most respected lawyers, is accused of lying to the Justice Department rather than admit that a Ukrainian billionaire paid his firm millions of dollars for work on behalf of the government of Ukraine. The indictment notes that the 74-year-old Craig did not want to register as a foreign agent “at least in part because he believed doing so could prevent him or others at the law firm from taking positions in the federal government in the future.”

The headlines will tell you that it’s the first time a prominent Democrat was charged in the Mueller investigation, a useless bit of score-keeping that implies Manafort worked with Craig out of some misguided act of bipartisanship. The truth is Ukraine attracted all sorts of Washington lawyers and lobbyists of all stripes who smelled money, including Tad Devine, chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s former strategist. Two others are under investigation for their work with Manafort in Ukraine: Tony Podesta, whose brother ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota.

Manafort wasn’t so much interested in Craig’s political leanings as he was in Craig’s stellar reputation and his firm’s integrity, both of which were apparently for sale. Before he resigned his partnership at the venerable law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom last year, Craig’s name appeared on the list of the 100 the most influential lawyers in America at one of the country’s most prestigious firms. A graduate of Harvard and a member of the same Yale Law School class as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Craig’s clients have included former CIA director Richard Helms; Senator Ted Kennedy, in connection with the rape trial of his nephew; and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Craig was a protégé of the famed D.C. trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, known around Washington as “the man to see.”

For $4 million, Craig was willing to draft an “independent” report that justified the jailing of a former Ukrainian prime minister even though, as the indictment noted, Craig personally believed that the evidence of criminal intent was “virtually non-existent.” Manafort was pleased by the media reaction to the report. “People in Kiev are very happy,” the lobbyist wrote Craig. “You are ‘THE MAN.’”