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Mueller's team nails 'Russian linked' lawyer
The son-in-law of a Russian oligarch pleaded guilty on Tuesday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a former campaign associate of President Trump.
Alex van der Zwaan, a former lawyer in the London offices of prominent New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, was accused of lying to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about his conversations with Rick Gates, according to the court documents released Tuesday.
Gates, a former Trump campaign aide, is also a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort, who for several months in 2016 was Trump’s campaign chairman.
Gates and Manafort were indicted in October by Mueller on charges of laundering millions of dollars they received working for pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych.
Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty during an appearance in federal court in Washington, DC, on a felony charge. Sentencing was set for April 3.
The plea comes just days after the Justice Department indicted 13 Russian nationals for carrying out a plot to disrupt the election.
In a November 2017 interview with investigators, van der Zwaan said his last contact with Gates was through an “innocuous” text message in August 2016.
But they actually talked the next month in a call van der Zwaan secretly recorded, the court documents say.
They discussed a report produced by Skadden in 2012 at Manafort’s request that showed the conviction the year before of Yanukovych’s rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was not politically motivated.
Van der Zwaan, 33, is the sonin-law of German Khan, who made his billions through financial and industrial investment groups. Bloomberg put his net worth at $9.7 billion.