A federal judge Tuesday dismissed one of the two charges Greg Craig is facing in connection with his past work for Ukraine, handing the former law firm partner and Obama White House counsel a partial victory as he prepares to stand trial in Washington next week.

In a 57-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia weighed Craig’s bid to dismantle charges he misled the Justice Department about a report he helped prepare for the Russia-backed government of Ukraine in 2012.  At that time, Craig was a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he led a team that evaluated the Ukrainian government’s prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and political rival of the country’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych.

The charge Jackson dismissed Tuesday arose out of letter Craig sent to the Justice Department in October 2013, in response to questions concerning whether he was required to report his Ukraine work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, an 80-year-old law designed to shine a light on foreign influence in the U.S. Newfound Justice Department enforcement on the law, widely known by its acronym FARA, has fueled legal business.

Jackson is preparing to meet with the lawyers in court Wednesday as she considers what evidence and testimony to allow at trial. Craig’s trial will be one of the most visible in years in Washington given his prominence in the legal community.

Craig has not been charged with failing to register as a foreign agent. But prosecutors allege his omission of key details about his role in the report’s public release violated a provision of the law that requires truthful and fulsome disclosures to the Justice Department.

Prosecutors and Craig’s defense team clashed over the scope of that provision—whether it applied only to disclosures mandated under FARA or, more broadly, to the letter Craig voluntarily sent in 2013. Jackson sided with Craig’s defense team, writing that the “legislature’s clear intent cannot be discerned.”

“Given this ambiguity concerning the breadth of the provision and the documents to which it was intended to apply, the rule of levity requires the dismissal of the count,” Jackson wrote, invoking the judicial equivalent of the tie-goes-to-the-runner rule in baseball.

“This is a close question,” she added later in the opinion.

Jackson allowed a false statements charge under a separate statute to proceed to trial.

On that count of the indictment, she wrote, “the question posed in the motion to dismiss is whether the indictment alleges a scheme to conceal something that Craig would have had a legal duty to reveal. The answer is yes: the Foreign Agents Registration Act creates the duty and puts individuals on notice of their specific disclosure obligations.”

Craig, she added, had an obligation to be “both truthful and complete” when he chose to answer questions aimed at assessing whether he need to register as a foreign agent.

“The facts the indictment alleges he omitted were the facts necessary to make the registration determination; the indictment sets forth sufficient facts to allege that they were—contrary to the defendant’s argument—the very sort of facts he was being asked about, and they were the facts that a foreign agent would ultimately have to disclose,” Jackson wrote. “Finally, it was the omission of those facts that allegedly made what he did say false or misleading, so they are appropriately included in the indictment for that reason alone.”

Gregory Craig. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi /NLJ

Jackson is considering other evidentiary issues, and her rulings Tuesday and those expected later this week will set the contours of the trial.

Jackson curtailed the testimony of a prominent white-collar defense lawyer Craig plans to call as as expert: Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer partner Amy Jeffress. She is prohibited from testifying that, in 2012 and 2013, it would have been “reasonable for a knowledgeable practitioner” in Craig’s position to believe there was no requirement to register as a foreign agent in connection with the type of report he prepared.

Jackson questioned the relevancy of that testimony. “This case is not about preparing a report without registering,” Jackson said. “So I hold that that opinion is not admissible because it’s not relevant. I don’t think we’re talking about preparing reports in this case.”

The judge also restricted the breadth of what a Justice Department lawyer, Heather Hunt, can testify about at Craig’s trial. Hunt, who formerly led the department’s FARA unit, is forbidden to discuss whether Craig or Skadden was required to register its work under the law. Skadden in January paid a $4.6 million civil fine over its Ukraine advocacy and subsequently registered the work.

“The court ruled that neither Hunt nor any expert proffered by the government or the defense will be permitted to instruct the jury on what the law requires, including the nature of any duty to disclose; that is solely the province of the court,” Jackson said in an order late Tuesday.

At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Jackson also cautioned one of Craig’s defense lawyers, Zuckerman Spaeder partner William Murphy, about his facial expressions. Jackson described Murphy as a “very expressive human being.”

“That is an asset to a trial lawyer in many ways,” she said. “But you can tell by your face exactly what you feel about what the government is saying, particularly if you find it to be incorrect. You’re not going to do that in front of the jury.”