Was Greg Craig’s prosecution political?

The grumbling was never far from the surface during Greg Craig’s three-week-long trial for allegedly scheming to deceive the U.S. government about his lobbying work related to Ukraine — was his prosecution the product of politics?

After the jury made short work of the government’s case Thursday — taking less than five hours to acquit the former lawyer for two Democratic presidents of the single felony charge he faced — the talk from Craig’s camp about the case being unjust became more blunt, although his defense attorneys still shied away from explicitly complaining that politics played a role in the decision to charge him.

“The question that you need to ask is not why this jury acquitted Greg Craig, but why the Department of Justice brought this case against an innocent man in the first place,” defense attorney William Taylor Jr. told reporters gathered outside the courthouse.

“Why, after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York rejected this prosecution, did this Department of Justice decide it had to hound this man and his family without any evidence and without any purpose?” the defense lawyer asked. “It’s a tragedy. It’s a disgrace. I’m glad it’s over.”

After framing the question for journalists, Taylor refused to answer it or elaborate. However, some of Craig’s friends were more direct in arguing that political considerations may have led the Justice Department to bring a case it wound up losing.

“This was in the hands of political people,” said longtime Craig friend Stuart Taylor Jr., an author, attorney and former New York Times reporter. “There’s a lot of politics going on at the Justice Department these days. That might well be a part of it.”

Taylor did not argue that prosecutors singled Craig out because he was a Democrat, but the Craig ally said the decision to charge the former Obama White House counsel may have been a misguided attempt to make former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe — which spurred the charges — look more evenhanded in the face of withering complaints from President Donald Trump that it was a political jihad led by Democratic partisans.

“Donald Trump might not be disappointed by the decision to try to make a criminal out of Greg Craig,” Taylor said.

The same thought occurred to at least some on the jury, according to one juror interviewed by POLITICO just after the verdict.

“It’s possible they wanted to bring something against a Democrat,” said Willie Wilson, 28. “I don’t think that cannot be thought about.”

Wilson, a commodities broker, said some jurors discussed that possibility, but only after they returned a verdict.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department declined to comment on Taylor’s remarks or Craig’s acquittal. Following a not-guilty verdict, federal prosecutors typically say little or nothing, in accordance with Justice Department policies.

The case against Craig did suffer from obvious weaknesses, like a lack of any written record of a key Oct. 9, 2013, meeting at which, prosecutors said, Craig lied to or misled members of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act unit about his work.

The prosecution called to the stand three eyewitnesses — the unit’s top lawyer at the time, Heather Hunt, and two members of Craig’s law firm, Lawrence Spiegel and Kenneth Gross.

None was able to recite any specific words said at the session and at least part of Gross’s testimony was helpful to the defendant. Craig also took the stand in his own defense and said he did not lie to or mislead anyone during the meeting.

The defense also called four character witnesses for Craig, who portrayed him as almost saintly in his devotion to honesty and the highest standards of the legal profession. And U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson gave jurors an instruction that character alone could be sufficient to acquit Craig by creating a reasonable doubt about whether he would have intentionally broken the law.

However, jurors who spoke to reporters after the verdict was returned Wednesday afternoon indicated that it was a closer call for Craig than the outrage mustered by the defense might suggest.

Two men who served on the jury said the relatively quick acquittal was triggered by a technical legal issue: a statute of limitations-related time frame that said Craig could be convicted only if he took an affirmative step to mislead the government after Oct. 3, 2013.

The timeline put the focus on the hazily recalled meeting and a letter Craig sent a couple of days later addressing some of the issues discussed at the session. Prosecutors said at least one statement in the letter was an outright lie and another was, at best, seriously misleading.

But jurors said they didn’t feel comfortable convicting Craig on those statements.

“There was a lot of very clever wording, but we just did not see it as enough to find him guilty,” Wilson said.

“It was done in a very narrow, lawyerly way,” said another juror, Michael Meyer, 60.

Wilson said, though, that he and others on the jury did believe Craig had lied to FARA personnel, just not in the window where they could convict him.

“I think that he walked up very close to the line. I was not of the opinion Greg Craig was a bad person, but he walked right up to the line and very well could have crossed it,” the juror said. “We think the evidence proved that he did lie prior to Oct. 3,” Wilson said, adding later that he believed some jurors agreed with that statement, but probably not all.

Beyond politics, there are other explanations for why prosecutors charged Craig, even though they likely realized it was a difficult case.

The charge against Craig stemmed from a report he and his then law firm, Skadden Arps, prepared for Ukraine’s government in 2012 about the controversial prosecution of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Another Skadden lawyer who worked on the report and was far junior to Craig, Alex van der Zwaan, pleaded guilty in February 2018 to lying to Mueller’s team about his work on the Ukraine project Craig headed up. The Dutch-born van der Zwaan admitted to a felony false-statement charge that might have ended his legal career. He also was sentenced to and served 30 days in prison before being deported.

Van der Zwaan’s attorneys said he lied because he didn’t want to lose his job at Skadden by acknowledging that he defied Craig by sharing a copy of his report with a public relations specialist for Ukraine.

Prosecutors may have believed it was unfair to have sought and obtained a felony conviction for van der Zwaan, then 33, while overlooking what Justice Department officials viewed as lies by Craig about the very same project.

One question that loomed if Craig were convicted was whether the judge might give him at least a short prison sentence in order to avoid an unseemly disparity with the sentence imposed on van der Zwaan.

The prosecution of Craig also arguably advanced an effort politicians in both parties have supported to step up enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. However, Craig wasn’t charged directly with failing to register and a judge dropped a second charge Craig faced of making a false FARA submission because it wasn’t clear whether the law applies to letters arguing against having to register.

Of course, the political door swings both ways, and it is possible that politics also colored the jury’s verdict. Jurors were not asked about their political views, but they were all residents of Washington, D.C., a city that votes overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Several jurors said they were closely following Mueller’s work and had a very unfavorable view of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, who also helped commission, fund and publicize the report Craig prepared back in 2012.

While there seemed a serious risk that jurors would be suspicious of Craig’s decision to work with Manafort, Craig’s defense did not seem to strike the Mueller fans or Manafort haters from the jury. That might have been a smart move.

One of the jurors who spoke to reporters Wednesday said he viewed the Craig case as a waste of resources that overlooked more significant dangers.

“What infuriates me about this whole case … is that the special counsel wasted so much time on an issue like this one when the republic itself was under assault. … I was deeply offended personally by this case,” Meyer added, before questioning why Mueller had charged no one for colluding with Russia.

Meyer also said he and some other jurors did not hold it against Craig that he found himself working hand-in-hand for a time with a figure like Manafort.

“A number of the older jurors understood life is a complicated thing,” Meyer said.