Attorneys for Greg Craig told reporters that they expect their client, a White House counsel for part of the Obama administration, to be indicted soon.
In a statement to several news outlets, attorneys William W. Taylor III and William Murphy said the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington will proffer charges related to Mr. Craig’s work with Ukrainian politicians and disgraced Trump-campaign figure Paul Manafort at the behest of the Justice Department’s national security division.
“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge,” his lawyers said in their statement that called the charges “a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”
Mr. Craig’s attorneys did not specify the exact charges they expect, nor did the U.S. Attorney’s Office or Justice Department have any immediate comment.
Mr. Craig had been a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, but resigned last April as investigations began into whether the law firm’s attorneys had failed to register as foreign lobbyists related to their work in 2012 for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice.
The firm was hired by the Justice Ministry to review, and to provide advice on, the prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, a rival of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, one of Manafort’s clients.
Mr. Craig’s attorneys said in their Wednesday statement, first reported by the Washington Post, that his work was as “an independent expert on the rule of law, not as an advocate for the client.”
Manafort has been sentenced to more than seven years of imprisonment for finance and foreign-lobbying crimes.
If indicted, Mr. Craig would be the first high-profile U.S. Democrat to be accused of a crime by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose probe into Russian involvement in the 2016 election has also investigated lobbying for the Kremlin and other foreign governments by figures in the Trump orbit, though it found no collusion with the Trump campaign itself.
Mr. Craig attended Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton and held positions in the Clinton administration before President Barack Obama made him his first White House counsel.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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