The court sentenced Russia to intervene in US elections to a lawyer involved in the case of Yulia Tymoshenko

April 3 federal court sentenced Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan to 30 imprisonment days for giving false testimony to federal investigators.

Photo: MSNBC video frame

This is the first sentence as a result of the investigation of the special prosecutor Robert Muller, who is investigating Russia's interference in the presidential elections in the United States. The Hill.

Van der Zwaan, who was also ordered to pay a fine of 20 000 dollars, pleaded guilty at the end of February 2018.

According to the indictment, van der Zwaan lied about his contacts with Donald Trump's campaign staff member Richard Gates, as well as with a Ukrainian businessman who has connections with both Gates and Trump's former headquarters officer Paul Manafort. He also tried to cover the traces of this communication by deleting the electronic correspondence that was requested from him in the office of the special prosecutor.

According to media reports, this businessman was Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer and longtime partner of Gates and Manafort.

Attorney’s connections to Trump’s campaign have not been established, but prosecutors claim that van der Zwaan and Gates met several times with Kilimnik in the last months of the election campaign, and their communication was “related to the subject of the investigation.”

Kilimnik denies any involvement in Russian intelligence.

Prosecutor Andrew Weisman said that van der Zwaan, who is the son-in-law of the Russian oligarch, is in an “unusual position” in terms of the data he has access to.

Several other members of Trump's headquarters also pleaded guilty to various crimes that Muller was able to solve, but none of the accusations made so far directly addressed the question of whether there was an agreement between Trump's headquarters and Moscow to influence the presidential election in USA.

For example, Trump’s chief of staff, Paul Manafort, was charged with multiple charges of fraud and money laundering, and he did not plead guilty to committing them. He was not charged with any charges related to interference with elections.

The charges against van der Zwaan focus on the work he did at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 2012, when preparing a report on the trial of former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko.

According to Muller’s team, during the preparation of the report, van der Zwaan worked closely with Manafor and Gates. The document called a reasonable trial, initiated against Tymoshenko, the former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. The US State Department criticized this report as a deceptive assessment of the actions of the Yanukovich administration, and the Muller team blamed Manafort and Gates for secretly paying for the preparation of this 4 million document.

Skadden, an influential New York law firm, said that in 2017, she fired Van der Zwaan and collaborates with the investigation.

The value of Van der Zwaan for the investigation of Muller is not yet clear, but prosecutors insist on the need to restrict public access to the materials of his case, since they are important for further investigation.

Van der Zwaan is the husband of the eldest daughter of Russian businessman Herman Khan, Eva.

33-year-old Alex van der Zwaan - a citizen of the Netherlands - speaks Russian, English and French.

At the beginning of 2018, his father-in-law came to the Kremlin’s telephone book — a report by the US Treasury on Putin’s closest associates.

In the fall of 2017, Khan, his partners, Mikhail Fridman and Peter Aven, filed a lawsuit against the Washington private investigative company Fusion gps and its main owner, Glen Simpson, he hired retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to compile a “spy file” about Donald Trump’s links with Putin’s entourage. Russian businessmen have accused Simpson and his company of defamation.

Forbes estimates Khan's fortune at 10 billion dollars - thus, a businessman takes the 138-place in the list of the richest people in the world.

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