[gallery type="rectangular" ids="503933,424346,448692"]
WASHINGTON (CN) — A powerful Washington lawyer facing charges spun off from the Mueller probe testified in his own defense Wednesday, telling federal jurors that his work on behalf of Ukraine never crossed the line into foreign lobbying.
Taking the stand two weeks into trial — after a dozen government witnesses teeming with his former Skadden Arps law firm colleagues — Greg Craig smiled sunnily at the jury box as he recounted the investigation he undertook in 2012, working out of Kiev and Washington on behalf of the Ukrainian government.
In those days, Ukraine was controlled by President Viktor Yanukovych with the Party of Regions, a pro-Kremlin political organization that secretly paid the now-convicted former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort millions to lobby on its behalf in the United States.
Yanukovych came to power in 2010, after an election where he defeated Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister who in turn found herself at the center of a series of criminal prosecutions later ruled to be politically motivated.
Craig had been White House counsel for the Obama administration in 2009, but in 2012 he was steering a team of Skadden Arps attorneys hired by Ukraine to report on whether Tymoshenko’s trial adhered to Western standards of justice.
Wearing a light gray suit and red-rimmed glasses in court today, the lawyer said he stuck to rule-of-law consulting and did not engage with public relations.
The distinction is key to Craig beating charges that he misled the Department of Justice to avoid registering as a foreign agent. Shielded by the statute of limitations, Craig is not charged with failing to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA. Skadden Arps reached a settlement to related charges earlier this year.
Though the government accuses Craig of contacting U.S. journalists to generate positive press coverage for Ukraine, Craig denied these allegations on the stand.
He said he made contact with three U.S. news outlets only to correct misinformation Ukraine spread on the conclusions of his report, which was prepared outside of FARA obligations as a rule-of-law consultant.
Grounding his testimony in a deep-seated mistrust of Ukraine’s PR consultant, Jonathan Hawker, Craig said he reached out to New York Times reporter David Sanger confident that he would publish fair coverage of the Skadden report.
Prosecutors previously showed the jury an email to Sanger in which Craig told the reporter that Ukraine wanted him to have an exclusive. Craig denied, however, that this email showed wrongdoing.
“I made a point of saying the Ukraine made the determination,” the lawyer testified. “I did not want David to think I was asking him for a favor here.”
Meantime, Craig was allegedly urging Hawker to back down. “I said ‘I’m handling it. Don’t worry about it,’” Craig testified.