WASHINGTON — Attorneys for former White House counsel Gregory Craig said Wednesday that he expects to face federal charges in the coming days in regard to legal work he did for the Ukrainian government in 2012.
The expected indictment – which his attorneys called “a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion” – stems from work Craig did with GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort on behalf of the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice in 2012.
At the time, Craig was a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the law firm he joined after ending his tenure as counsel to President Barack Obama. Manafort, the former campaign chairman to President Trump, pleaded guilty last year to charges related to his Ukraine lobbying.
In a statement, attorneys William Taylor and William Murphy said they expect Craig, 74, will be indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington at the request of the Justice Department’s national security division. That could not be independently corroborated. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge,” Craig’s attorneys said in their statement.
Craig resigned from Skadden in April 2018 amid a building investigation into whether the firm’s lawyers didn’t register as foreign lobbyists for their Ukraine engagement.
He would be the first prominent Democratic figure to be charged as a result of a foreign lobbying investigation spun out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
His indictment would represent a dramatic turn for a member of the country’s most elite legal circles. Craig attended Yale University’s law school with Bill and Hillary Clinton and later worked in the State Department and White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. An early Obama supporter, he served for a year as his first White House counsel. He is also a veteran of the Washington-based law firm Williams and Connolly.
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