Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig indicted on charges of lying to Mueller's team

Former White House Counsel Gregory Craig was indicted by a grand jury Thursday on two charges of making false statements about and hiding his foreign lobbying work.

Craig, who served under former President Barack Obama, allegedly made false statements to multiple federal investigators about his need to register as a foreign lobbyist for the Ukrainian government. The charges were incurred partly in connection to interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Craig served as White House counsel for a year under Obama and was former President Bill Clinton's director of policy planning for a year. He joined President Trump's ex-campaign chair Paul Manafort in 2012 on lobbying work for the Ukrainian government. Manafort pleaded guilty to charges relating to his lobbying work last September. While Craig's allegedly misleading interviews began within the Mueller investigation, his case was transferred to the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

The indictments come after Craig's lawyers released a statement Wednesday morning saying that he expected to be charged in the investigation. Craig's lawyers maintained that he "is not guilty of any charge" and said the whole ordeal was a "misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion." The Department of Justice is currently pursuing foreign lobbying investigations against several other prominent lobbyists and firms and has escalated its pace of prosecution.