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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