Guilty Plea in another Mueller Process Crime prosecution unrelated to Trump Campaign or Russian Meddling
False statements connected to the lawyer’s work with Ukraine in 2012.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan for making “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations” to his office and the FBI.
Van Der Zwaan will appear in a federal court in Washington this afternoon. He is expected to enter in a guilty plea since he was charged with a criminal information.
Mueller claims Van Der Zwaan lied about his communications with former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates and with someone else only identified as Person A and deleted emails that his office requested concerning a report from 2012 with Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice.
The indictment states that these lies came about when Mueller’s office and the FBI questioned Van Der Zwaan about “his work as an attorney employed by a law firm engaged in 2012 by the Ukraine Ministry of Justice to prepare a report on the trial of Yulia Tymoshenko.”
Van Der Zwaan allegedly told Mueller and the FBI that he last spoke with Gates in mid-August 2016. Mueller wrote in the indictment that the lawyer knew he spoke with Gates in September 2016.
Van Der Zwaan, the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan, works at international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York City.
Mueller indicted Gates last October “in connection with foreign lobbying work and pleaded not guilty.” The charges range “from conspiracy against the U.S. to conspiracy to launder money.”
I have a few questions. If the indictment is correct, why would Van Der Zwaan speak to Gates and Person A about a report from 2012 on Tymoshenko?
Here’s some history: In 2010, Tymoshenko ran for president against Viktor Yanukovych. International organizations launched allegations of fraud during the election.
Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow candidate, ended up winning, but Tymoshenko won the hearts of Ukraine and the international community. Not long after the election, Yanukovych and the government opened criminal cases against Tymoshenko, including bribes and crooked gas and energy deals. The international community considered her a political prisoner.
I may have an answer. In August 2016, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty published a report that former Trump chairman Paul Manafort and Gates worked for Yanukovych’s “Party of Regions and directed a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort between 2012 and 2014 that undercut U.S. public support for Tymoshenko, though she was considered a political prisoner by the United States and European governments at the time.”
However, as usual, more questions have come up like why is this important? Who is Person A? What does this have to do with supposed collusion between Trump and Russia? Is this similar to Manafort, who received charges of failing to file as a foreign agent?
Last August, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Mueller permission to expand and investigate any crimes he comes across during his Russia probe.
I mean, I’m looking at the history of that time period and trying to find out why this report is so important. A report from 2012 somehow has an impact on our 2016 election? We all know that I love Ukraine and despise Russia, but Mueller should give us some more information to make sense of this.
Something tells me the mainstream media won’t ask these questions because MUH NARRATIVES and they can easily make it look like a black eye for Trump.
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Comments
There seems to be a lot of hubris in this effort of a coup. I have very little faith in the motives and decisions made by Mueller and his witch hunting team. I believe this whole thing is creating a Constitutional Crisis as it moves along for so long, while searching for a means to overthrow the sitting President.
It bugs me that every GOPe and their uncle says Mueller is an honest broker. I don’t believe it for a moment. Sessions needs to step up or step down. Who has Trump sent on to the senate for confirmation for the DOJ and FBI should heads roll? All I see are Obama appointees to step up, this seems like poor planning. Drain the SWAMP.
I’d rather have cross-dressing, homosexual J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the F.B.I. – even of those things were true about him.
However since those accusations always came the Democrats, they’re highly questionable……
He’s got to keep this going so all of those Hillary donors on his team can recoup the money they lost betting on Hillary
I think Mueller should conclude his phony investigation and resign. Then he should disappear from public view for a long time.
And if Sessions had a spine his DOJ would be prosecuting the actual crimes that EVERYBODY knows were committed.
No collusion. And the investigation itself is creating the crimes. When the Feds play that card, they have nothing but malice left.
And they appear to be getting away with it, for now.
Our government and its law enforcement arms is the enemy.
I have this mental picture of a conversation that goes roughly:
We have evidence of you laundering money for the Ukraine five years ago, and if you don’t provide some evidence for Trump colluding with Russian agents to fix the 2016 election, we’ll send you to jail for twenty years.
What if Trump didn’t conspire with the Russians at all? I mean I never heard of that at all when I was in the campaign, so how can I give you any evidence for a crime that didn’t happen?
Well, I guess we will just have to send you to jail on the money laundering charges, then.
Wait! Let me make something… I mean remember something for you. What do you want me to say?
Will any American be charged with anything other than a process crime?
I think we have come to the point that refusing to even speak to FBI no matter the circumstances even as a representative is best policy. Not even to say good day as then they just have to prove it was not a good day.
There *does* appear to be one time and place where speaking to the FBI is perfectly fine: In your lawyer’s office, with *your* recording device running. (and telling the agents quite plainly about it, of course)
For some reason, that seems to drive them away. Not quite sure why.
Didn’t the USA under Obama/Hillary also spend money to alter the political process in Ukraine? “Bribes and crooked gas and energy deals”… can we be comfortable that anything done by Obama/Clinton was altruistic? Remember the USA (government) also signed on to stay out of internal Ukrainian affairs. I feel that all these actions gave a bad actor (Russia) the legitimate reason to react but left Ukraine with empty hands to stop the land grab. Same basic outcome as Hungarian Revolution and Bush/Georgia and South Ossetia.
These national prosecution authorities: special prosecutors and independent counsels have bad histories. Spend well on themselves, prosecute anyone for anything. Nasty. Very unAmerican. Not unknown in our legal tradition, for we have examples from England and Scotland such as the infamous Star Chamber. Bad stuff. Not “due process”. Not justice. it’s the devil himself.
Part of the overall propaganda engine designed to frighten the sheep all the way up to the midterms.
Why should the left and the neocons give this tactic up, nobody is opposing them and it works.
The ultimate goal is to make Trump persona non grata. Their only hope of slowing him down or reversing his successes is to make everyone who helps him a target of abuse, ridicule and now criminal investigation. This has been going on for over a year with all his appointments and staff. It only makes sense for Mueller to take it to a new level.
What they don’t realize is that Trump always wins in the end. Look for the Republicans to apply the same level of scrutiny to Dems over the next three years. The Dems never think to look in the mirror before doing this shift. Think about it. Would Al Franken still be a Senator if they hadn’t tried to label Trump a sexist or if Hillary was president.
You cannot beat Trump at his own game.
haven’t you heard?
The latest buzz is, that Russian ‘bots are what brought Franken down.
I kid you not
So this guy was appointed to find dirt on Trump regarding Russia.
And, so far he found:
– some Trump aides were doing some not really illegal transactions while doing business in Ukraine, while not connected to Trump.
– some lawyer was representing some USA business in Ukraine
– some (13) suspected Russians were trolling from within USA
That is what he have so far and admitted to it.
How many millions is he paid for this pathetic performance?
Mary Chastain: Guilty Plea in another Mueller Process Crime prosecution unrelated to Trump Campaign or Russian Meddling
Turns out that lying to the FBI is a crime. Have you considered why he might have lied?
Have you considered why you commies always lie?
Alex Van der Zwaan admits that he lied to investigators about the contact that he’d had with Trump adviser Rick Gates, who is also set to plead guilty this week. Gates has already given his plea deal interview to Mueller, and this appears to be the first known fruit of it. Van der Zwaan also deleted emails after being asked to turn them over to Mueller.
Van der Zwaan has a number of connections to the Trump-Russia conspiracy, and we don’t yet know if those connections are why Mueller flipped him. But even the details of this give away a lot about how Mueller is going to proceed when it comes to dealing with Donald Trump’s advisers and associates. He nailed this guy on criminal charges simply for refusing to turn over the information that had been requested. That same general description fits dozens of Trump’s own people, both from the campaign and from the White House.
In other words, Robert Mueller may end up indicting or charging hundreds of people in the Trump-Russia scandal before it’s over. He’s already at nineteen, with five of them now having agreed to plead guilty, and yet these charges have barely scratched the surface when it comes to the criminal activity that’s been alleged in this scandal. This is a sign that everyone is going down who committed even a whiff of a crime. It’s also a sign that Mueller’s arrest phase is accelerating.
It actually also shows that there really is nothing there. And contrary to your assertion, this is not a Trump-Russia scandal. Trump’s campaign did not coordinate its efforts to beat Hillary with a foreign government, Russians included.
These indictments have nothing to do with the so called collusion. Full stop. And if there is ONE indictment that does have to do with collusion, it’s the Papadopolous one which actually bolsters Trump’s claims. If you remember, Papadopolous is only charged with lying to the FBI. And he claimed he tried to get the Trump campaign to meet with Russians BUT HE COULD NEVER GET THEM TO.
And while we are talking about indictments, wtf with the Russians he indicted.
First he didn’t indict them for election violations (though the first paragraph of the indictment brings that up). He indicted them for conspiracy to defraud the US and wire fraud. 18 USC 371 NOT elections violations. He could have indicted them for not registering as a foreign agent. He could have indicted them for engaging in political activity. He didn’t. Just for fraud and conspiracy.
Second, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell any of those guys will see the inside of a US courtroom. It is a meaningless show.
There just really must not be any “there” there.
Time to end this farce.
Mueller needs to be subpoenaed in Uranium One. Force him to step down.
“…has charged lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan for making “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations” to his office and the FBI.”
Can someone please explain why it’s illegal for people to lie to a government official, but it’s not illegal for a government official to lie to the people?
Did I read that wrong? He lied when he said he thought his last conversation with someone was in mid August 2016, but in reality it was September 2016?
Am I missing something.
Yea, Mueller is a crooked bastard.
“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime”
Beria
If Mueller uncovers unrelated crimes they should be handed off to the FBI for investigation. But that’s not how special prosecutors operate. Remember Ken Starr? He was supposed to investigate Whitewater and ended up with Monica Lewinsky.
I’m sure someone will correct me if wrong, but’s my understanding that Starr was given specific direction from the DOJ for each new branch of his investigations
I assume Mueller’s investigation won’t be retired until Trump leaves office. If he gets reelected Mueller will have an 8 year “investigation” on his hands.
He will be sued and physically forced out of existence before that.
Not only was the guy a whole two weeks off in his answer to the timing of his last email to Gates in 2012, he also failed to produce some emails.
The whole point of this exercise was to get the following headline in the papers “New Guilty Plea in Mueller Inquiry.”
Where I live, Democrats read the headline only, and fail to comprehend that the article has nothing to do with either DJT or Russia.
I read this article in the local paper, and the gravamen of this accusation is that Alex van der Zwann worked at Skadden at the time when Manafort asked Skadden to draft a report that was not critical enough of a Ukranian political candidate’s human rights record.
from the article”
“It is unclear what role van der Zwaan played in crafting the report.”
I wonder what happened to the indictments of “Gregory Craig, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel, as well as Clifford Sloan, who also worked in the Obama administration,” who were also at Skadden at the time.
So we are now filing criminal charges against people for (apparently corrected) discovery failures?
But Hillary may have disclosed our top secret deliberations while she was Secretary of State via her email server, and then attempted to destroy records in response to a subpoena, and that is apparently ok.
My justice bone is irritated.