Greg Craig, a White House counsel for former President Barack Obama, was indicted on April 11 on two counts of making false and misleading statements to investigators.
Craig, a 74-year-old lawyer based in Washington, was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for allegedly falsifying and concealing “material facts” and making false statements to the Department of Justice National Security Division’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Unit, which is responsible for enforcing foreign lobbying laws.
Craig performed lobbying work for Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-backed Ukranian president, in 2012 while a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He and the firm were hired by Ukraine’s government to write a report to analyze the government’s prosecution of top dissident Yulia Tymoshenko and see if she was given a fair trial.
Critics claimed the report was a way for Yanukovych’s government to whitewash what was widely criticized as a politically motivated abuse of power.
Investigators looking into Craig’s lobbying said that he made false statements.
“The purpose of the scheme was for Craig to avoid registration as an agent of Ukraine,” the indictment states. “Registration would require disclosure of the fact that Private Ukrainian had paid Craig and the Law Firm more than $4 million … [and] undermine the Report and Craig’s perceived independence; and impair the ability of Craig and others at the Law Firm to later return to government positions.”
The indictment included emails between Craig and a lobbyist that authorities said showed he arranged for his and the law firm’s work to appear to be paid for by the Ukranian government, as opposed to a private citizen in the country.
“A truthful and complete FARA registration by Craig would have made a public record of the Private Ukrainian’s role in funding the report and the amounts he paid to the law firm,” the indictment states. It also said he withheld contacts with several reporters from the law firm.
Craig faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the two counts, as well as fines of up to $260,000.
His lawyers said in a statement: “Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”
The charges came about three months after Craig’s former law firm agreed to pay more than $4.6 million and acknowledge that it didn’t register with the government for its work for the Ukraine government. The firm said it received $4.6 million, much more than the $12,000 the Ukranian government said it had paid.
Craig’s lawyers said on Wednesday that he expected to be indicted.
He was pulled into the probe conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of Mueller’s scrutiny of veteran political operative Paul Manafort and his work on behalf of Ukrainian politicians. Manafort was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for illicit foreign lobbying and other crimes in March.
The work in question in Craig’s case is tied to another successful prosecution by the special counsel’s office. Early last year, Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to making false statements to the special counsel in relation to his work for Craig and Skadden. He wrote a report on the prosecution of Tymoshenko, the top dissident and former Ukrainian prime minister. Tymoshenko was a political opponent of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was a longtime Manafort patron.
Craig was not named in the statement of offense (pdf). Skadden was referred to as “Law Firm A.” Van der Zwaan, a Belgian-born Dutch national, was sentenced to 30 days in prison in April last year.
The special counsel investigation concluded that neither President Donald Trump nor anyone in his campaign colluded with Russia. Attorney General William Barr is expected to release Mueller’s final report within a week.
Epoch Times reporter Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.