Greg Craig
© Win McNamee/Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesAttorney Greg Craig arrives at US District Court in Washington, DC.
Greg Craig, the Obama White House counsel swept up in a case spun off from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, denied on the stand Wednesday allegations he'd misled investigators looking into whether he'd acted as an agent of Ukraine.

Craig, 74, is charged with misleading Department of Justice investigators about his role promoting the report put together at the behest of the Kremlin-linked government in Ukraine regarding the country's controversial prosecution of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for alleged corruption.

Craig testified that he did not lie to investigators and that his only involvement in any media outreach was to stop the whitewashing of the conclusions of his report by Ukraine's Ministry of Justice or by people working for Manafort, saying his report was "bad news for Ukraine" and that he was motivated by a desire for his report to be portrayed accurately in the media.

Tymoshenko was prosecuted under President Viktor Yanukovych, who worked closely with Paul Manafort. The DOJ's case against Craig focuses on the public relations work allegedly performed for Ukraine by Craig and the law firm he worked for — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom — throughout 2012.

Craig allegedly "schemed, falsified, and concealed" important facts from the then-head of DOJ's Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement unit, Heather Hunt, and the members of her team in 2013. The "scheme" relates to the foreign agents law, which mandates anyone working on behalf of a foreign government register with the DOJ.

"I did not lie to Ms. Hunt or members of the FARA unit," Craig testified today. "And I did not withhold or conceal information from Ms. Hunt or members of the FARA unit."

Prosecutors say Craig initially sought advice about whether he'd need to register under the law if he took the job writing the report and that a Skadden colleague advised him writing a report would be fine, but doing public relations work would not, and that Craig's deceptions likely stemmed from a desire to avoid registering as a foreign agent.

But during nearly four hours of testimony, Craig maintained Skadden put together an independent report and denied his involvement in the media plans put together by Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's right hand man, and Jonathan Hawker, the British publicist who Manafort brought on to shape a pro-Yanukovych media narrative. Gates and Hawker both testified against Craig.

"I did not trust Jonathan Hawker to give an honest portrayal of our report on the Tymoshenko trial," Craig said. "I had no confidence he would be accurate or honest."

Prosecutors say Craig was especially deceptive about his interactions with David Sanger of the New York Times, pointing out that Craig offered Sanger the report ahead of its release, emailed it to him and hand-delivered a copy to his home, and did an interview with him and other reporters. But Craig said he only did so because he believed Hawker would lie about the report's contents, planning to spin the report the way his bosses wanted him to and claim the report showed Tymoshenko's trial wasn't politically motivated when Skadden did not reach a determination on that issue.

"I feared he would care more about pleasing Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates than accurately portraying our report," Craig testified. "He seemed to have just signed up for whatever the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice wanted to do."

And Craig said that "if anyone was going to talk to the New York Times, it was going to be me."

Craig was asked repeatedly by his defense attorney whether he believed any of the conversations he had with journalists from the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Daily Telegraph, or the National Law Journal crossed the line given the advice he'd been given about DOJ's rules related to registering as a foreign agent.

"I did not think correcting misinformation crossed any line or made me an agent of Ukraine," Craig said.

Craig was also asked whether he'd helped the Ukrainian government advance its agenda.

"I did not — quite the contrary," Craig testified. "I was not acting in the interests of Ukraine. I was trying to defend the accuracy of the report."

Craig did admit that one of his letters to DOJ's FARA unit got a significant date wrong. Craig told investigators Skadden didn't contact the media until Dec. 12, 2012, when he'd reached out to Sanger on Dec. 11, 2012.

"I just muddled it up," Craig said.

Prosecutors will get the chance to cross-examine Craig this afternoon.