Former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, one of the most critical witnesses for Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, appeared in federal court again Thursday to testify against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig at his ongoing trial stemming from a Ukraine-related legal project Craig did involving Gates’s former boss Paul Manafort.
Gates’ turn as a prosecution witness Thursday is his first public court appearance since he took the stand a year ago at the Mueller-led trial of Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, on tax and bank fraud charges.
Gates served as Manafort’s right-hand-man for about a decade, including the period in 2012 when Manafort was involved in overseeing an in-depth review Craig conducted of the widely-criticized trial of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on abuse-of-power charges.
The project — billed as an independent review of the controversial prosecution — was commissioned by Manafort’s main client at the time, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and secretly funded by a Ukrainian steel oligarch who backed Yanukovych, Viktor Pinchuk.
Craig served in 2009 as President Barack Obama’s first White House counsel, was a key figure in Obama’s first presidential bid, and had previously joined President Bill Clinton’s White House to defend him against impeachment. He is charged with scheming to conceal material facts during a Justice Department inquiry into his Ukraine work and whether it required him to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Prosecutors say Craig was intent on not doing so because he believed such a filing would harm his chances of a senior post in a future Democratic administration and because detailed disclosures called for under that statute could have undermined the credibility of the review by exposing the secret funding of the $4.
6 million project by Pinchuk and by revealing a parallel assignment Craig’s then-law-firm Skadden Arps had to advise Ukraine’s government on a planned second trial of Tymoshenko on other charges.Craig, 74, has pleaded not guilty and denies that he ever sought to lie to or mislead U.S. officials about his role in the project or the core issue in the trial: his involvement in the rollout of the report in the media in December 2012.
The release of the report was the focus of months of painstaking choreography by Manafort, Gates and a coterie of public relations advisers and lobbyists seeking to improve Yanukovych’s public image and put his country on a path to greater integration with the European Union.
However, Craig insists that his actions to publicize the Tymoshenko report — including by hand-delivering an embargoed copy of the 186-page review to longtime New York Times national security reporter David Sanger’s Washington home — were not part of the carefully crafted media plan Manafort and Gates prepared.
Craig and his defense lawyers have argued that his contacts with the press were solely aimed at protecting his and Skadden’s reputation in the face of repeated indications that Manafort’s team and others working for Ukraine’s government intended to falsely portray the rather equivocal report as a vindication of the prosecution and imprisonment of Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s key political rival.
The showdown between Craig and Gates is something of a reputational mismatch.
Craig is one of the most well-respected members of the Washington bar, whose career in public service began with registering African-American voters in the South during the civil rights movement half a century ago.
Craig attended Yale Law School, where he was in the same class as Bill and Hillary Clinton. Craig later served as general counsel to Sen. Ted Kennedy and in one of the most prestigious posts at the State Department under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Gates got his start as an intern at the Washington political consulting and lobbying firm founded by Manafort and veteran GOP operative Charlie Black. The firm was known for representing unsavory foreign leaders such as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Angola’s Jonas Savimbi. Gates eventually became Manafort’s key deputy at a small spin-off firm, Davis Manafort.
Gates was thrust into public view in August 2017 when he and Manafort were indicted in the first case publicly brought by Mueller’s office. They were accused of conspiring to avoid registering for their Ukraine work, money laundering, making false statements and failing to report offshore bank accounts.
Gates initially vowed to fight the charges, but capitulated in February of last year, agreeing to plead guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI. In a bid for leniency, he became a prolific behind-the-scenes cooperator with Mueller’s team.
Gates’ public debut for Mueller came at Manafort’s trial in Virginia last August. He admitted that he and Manafort used millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean to avoid U.S. taxes.
Gates endured blistering cross-examination from Manafort’s attorneys. During the Virginia trial, Gates admitted to stealing from Manafort. Gates also said he may have swindled money from Trump’s inaugural committee during his time working for that organization.
Defense attorneys also drew attention to Gates’ personal life, exposing that he’d had extramarital affairs. At a pretrial hearing last month, the judge handling the Craig trial asked both sides if they planned to explore this aspect of Gates’ past. Lawyers for the prosecution and defense both said no.
Gates was expected to be a crucial witness at a second trial for Manafort that was to take place in Washington following the Virginia one, but Manafort agreed to plead guilty in that case. He’s currently serving a combined sentence of about seven and a half years in prison stemming from both federal cases.
Both before and after his guilty pleas last year, Gates has been free on bond, living in Richmond and occasionally traveling with his family on court-approved trips. He is still awaiting sentencing on the two felony charges he admitted to.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine