He was once President Obama’s lawyer, but now he’s one of the latest people to face scrutiny for his association with Paul Manafort. The New York Times reports that federal prosecutors are about to decide whether to prosecute former White House Counsel Greg Craig for his alleged complicity in a covert lobbying campaign Manafort waged on behalf of his pro-Russian clients in the former Ukrainian government.
How did Craig get caught up in the Russia investigation?
Craig hasn’t been charged with a crime, denies any wrongdoing, and the work he did as a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom took place years before the 2016 election. But he came to the attention of the special counsel’s office because of his involvement with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
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Manafort pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. In the course of the special counsel’s investigation of him, prosecutors discovered that Manafort had subcontracted part of his covert lobbying campaign out to a range of companies including Mercury Public Affairs, the Podesta Group, and Skadden, where Craig was a partner.
In 2012, Manafort hired Skadden to write a report about the propriety of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s prosecution of his former political rival Yulia Tymoshenko. Manafort, who was convicted of illegally lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych, wanted to make the prosecution seem less like an abuse of power. He hired a team of Skadden lawyers to write the report for $4.6 million paid from his offshore bank accounts while the Ukrainian government falsely claimed that the report had only cost $12,000.
The Special Counsel’s Office reportedly referred the Skadden issue and other related cases to regular prosecutors in the Department of Justice for further investigation.
Why is Craig under investigation?
Prosecutors alleged that Skadden’s report, which whitewashed the prosecution of Tymoshenko, amounted to lobbying work on behalf of the Ukrainian government. Skadden, however, didn’t register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the work—at least not initially.
In January 2019, the Justice Department reached a civil settlement with the law firm under which Skadden paid the U.S. Treasury $4.6 million, the cost of the report, and agreed to register belatedly as a foreign agent for its work. In a press release about the settlement, the Justice Department alleged that an unnamed “Partner-1”—subsequently identified as Craig, who left the firm in April 2018—did two things.
First, prosecutors alleged that Craig crossed the line from providing legal advice to lobbying when he pitched an unnamed reporter on the story, provided a copy of it in advance, and offered a quote when it was released. Craig was quoted by The New York Times on the report the day it came out. In doing so, the Justice Department wrote that Craig had taken “steps to advance the public relations campaign” associated with the report.
Second, the Justice Department alleged that Craig “made false and misleading statements to the FARA Unit” about the firm’s work on the Tymoshenko report, “which led it to conclude in 2013 that the firm was not obligated to register under FARA.” Specifically, the Justice Department alleged that Craig told FARA officials that Skadden only provided the report when requested by the media and “spoke to the media to correct misinformation about the report that the media was already reporting.”
Why would Paul Manafort hire a Democrat?
Sure, Manafort is a lifelong Republican who advised a host of Republican presidential campaigns and later served as convention manager and chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign. But back in 2012, Manafort’s Ukrainian clients wanted a better international image and better relations with the U.S. government, which at that time included both the Democrat who controlled the White House and Senate and the Republicans who controlled the House.
Manafort had an ecumenical hiring approach that showed he was able to separate his personal interest in the Republican party from his professional responsibilities towards his clients. Before he began lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych, Manafort hired Democratic operatives like Bernie Sanders strategist Tad Devine to consult on Yanukovych’s election campaign.
Craig isn’t the only person prosecutors have looked at
Craig isn’t the only Skadden employee whom prosecutors have scrutinized as a result of the firm’s work with Manafort. Alexander Van Der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney who worked on the report for Skadden, pleaded guilty to lying to the Special Counsel’s Office and law enforcement about his interactions with Manafort’s aides, Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik, and his role in publicizing the Tymoshenko report when it was finished. Specifically, Van Der Zwaan destroyed documents related to the investigation, lied to prosecutors, and said he “played a passive role” in the Tymoshenko report rollout when he’d secretly provided an advance copy of the report to a public relations firm and sent talking points about it to Gates. Skadden fired Van Der Zwaan in 2017.
Updated 3/26 to reflect when Craig and Van Der Zwaan left.
