Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig adamantly resisted registering as a foreign agent for his Ukraine-related work, citing concerns that doing so could complicate efforts by him or others to go to work for the U.S. government in the future, a senior partner at Craig’s former law firm testified Monday.
Skadden Arps general counsel Lawrence Spiegel testified that Craig, who’s facing a criminal charge of trying to deceive the Justice Department about his work, was unusually emphatic as he argued internally that Skadden personnel should not be required to file as foreign agents for its project investigating the trial of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
“He said it could have consequences for him and, potentially, others on the team if the firm registered as a foreign agent,” Spiegel said, recounting a September 2013 conversation with Craig about a letter from the Justice Department saying the firm needed to register. “He said something about the Obama pledge or conflict policy but that if we registered it would bar him and potentially others on the team from going into the government for, I think he said, two years.”
“What was Mr. Craig’s tone in this conversation, if you recall?” prosecutor Molly Gaston asked.
“He was very strongly advocating that we were right and they got it wrong. That’s what I remember,” Spiegel added.
Prosecutors say that ambition was a key part of Craig’s motive to mislead the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, but the defense seemed to embrace Craig’s agitation on the subject.
“It’s fair to say he was pretty passionate?” defense attorney William Taylor asked, during a two-minute cross-examination that followed nearly an hour of questions from Gaston.
“I would say he was very passionate in his view,” Spiegel replied.
The defense’s contention previewed during opening arguments in the case is that Craig — a veteran trial lawyer with extensive experience at the highest levels of government — was so “hot” over the Justice Department’s stance that he fired off an email to Spiegel that contained several inaccuracies about the firm’s handling of media contacts about the Tymoshenko report and the firm’s coordination with Ukraine’s public relations team.
Prosecutors contend those same misstatements and omissions became part of Craig’s presentation to Justice’s FARA unit the following month.
It’s unclear what future jobs Craig may have wanted to preserve his viability for, but one of Craig’s main Skadden colleagues on the Ukraine project — Cliff Sloan — left the firm in June 2013 amid the Justice inquiry. Sloan spent a year and a half at the State Department as the Obama administration’s envoy for closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.
A retroactive FARA filing by Skadden could have complicated or even scuttled Sloan’s appointment.
Jurors also heard Monday from the key government official Craig is charged with misleading, Heather Hunt. Hunt has worked in Justice’s FARA unit for more than 35 years and served as its chief from about 2002 to earlier this year.
Hunt explained how Craig’s work came under scrutiny, initially because of a Los Angeles Times article including a statement from Craig about the report.
Hunt said one particular claim her office found curious was the assertion in an agreement Skadden had with Ukraine about the project that the retainer was for the equivalent of about $12,000 in Ukrainian currency.
“It was quite a bit of work involved for $12,000. So, it was something we were looking at,” she said. “All of that was important to trying to determine the different foreign principals involved. It was basically going to who was behind this whole effort.”
Hunt and Spiegel also both recalled an event key to the charge against Craig — an Oct. 9, 2013 meeting Skadden requested to try to get Justice to reverse course in its drive to make the firm register as a foreign agent. Prosecutors say that at that in-person exchange, which took place in a partially-shuttered federal building in Washington during a government shutdown, Craig lied to and misled Justice’s FARA team.
“They wanted to make clear to us that all the communications they had with the media were done independently,” Hunt recalled. “Mr. Craig did most of the talking. It was that any contact that he had with the press …. was done on his own, to correct mischaracterizations that were made, that were reported about his work product this report on Tymoshenko case…. That was my takeaway from the meeting: he did it on his own and not at the request or under the direction or control of Ukraine.”
Spiegel’s recollection was more vague. He said he remembers FARA personnel asking “detailed questions to try to poke and probe whether what we were saying in terms of not being an agent and [being] reactive and corrective.”
“I don’t remember anything being said that was inconsistent with our understanding going in which is that we were not an agent, we were reacting to outreach to us and that we were making corrections,” Spiegel added.
The defense has repeatedly made clear to jurors that no notes appear to exist of the meeting, so no one can recall precisely what Craig said.
In March of this year, the Justice Department named a prosecutor who’d worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’ Trump-Russia investigation, Brandon Van Grack, to oversee the FARA unit. Hunt was given a new title, senior counsel for FARA registration.
The shift installed a new layer of supervision over FARA and was interpreted by some observers as an implicit critique of the foreign-agent office for having been too passive in the past.
However, when Hunt was asked by prosecutor Jason McCullough Monday whether she liked the new role, she answered affirmatively.
“I do very much,” she said.
Van Grack, who was in court for part of the Craig trial on Friday, was not seen as Hunt testified Monday.
In January of this year, Skadden filed a retroactive FARA registration for its work on the Ukraine project. Under a deal designed to stave off enforcement action against the firm, it agreed to step up its compliance efforts and to pay the government $4.6 million — the net amount of fees and expenses Skadden took in for the Ukraine work.
Both the prosecution and Craig’s attorneys agreed not to discuss the Skadden settlement at Craig’s trial.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine