WASHINGTON (CN) — A high-profile Washington lawyer accused of working on a secret campaign to sway America’s perception of Ukraine when it was cozy with the Kremlin faced a grueling cross-examination Thursday over a report that cost him his job at Skadden Arps.
Greg Craig appeared on the stand in Washington for the second day today, two weeks into a trial that will decide whether he misled the Justice Department about his work with Ukraine to avoid registering as a foreign lobbyist.
The Ukrainian government hired Craig in 2012 while the country was facing widespread criticism over its prosecution of its former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign two years earlier against Party of Regions candidate Viktor Yanukovych.
Around the same time, years before Donald Trump would tap him to chair his own election campaign, Paul Manafort was earning millions from the pro-Russia Party of Regions to lobby on its behalf in the United States.
Craig, who joined the powerhouse firm after a brief stint as White House counsel under Barack Obama, denies that he was part of this influence campaign. On direct examination from his defense team Wednesday, Craig insisted he did legitimate rule-of-law consulting for Ukraine about its prosecution of Tymoshenko.
Pushing back against this characterization Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez noted that the Skadden Arps report that Craig authored was widely seen as defending the Tymoshenko prosecution, which courts later ruled violated her rights.
“You were aware that there was a lot of criticism of your report because some people saw it as pro-Yanukovych?” Campoamor-Sanchez asked, noting that the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton was among those that took issue with the Skadden report.
Craig, in the witness box, replied he was aware but chalked it up as “based on mischaracterizations of our conclusions.”
On Wednesday, Craig had emphasized: “We steered clear and did not, explicitly did not express an opinion on whether the prosecution had been politically motivated.”
Nearing the end of two hours of cross-examination, Campoamor-Sanchez showed the jury, a 12-person panel plus two alternates, draft copies of the letter Craig sent in June 2013 to the unit of the Justice Department that handles Foreign Agents Registration Act compliance.
Alleging that Craig omitted critical information, the prosecutor dialed in on the response listing Dec. 12-13 as the time period Craig communicated with U.S. journalists.
On the stand Wednesday, Craig admitted the dates were wrong — he emailed New York Times reporter David Sanger on Dec. 11 and later that day delivered a copy of the Skadden report to the journalist's doorstep located just one mile from Craig’s home in Washington.
But Craig testified Thursday the dates were not a calculated effort to mislead the government.