Alex van der Zwaan Sentenced to 30 Days for Lying to Special Counsel

Alex van der Zwaan arrives at a plea agreement hearing at the D.C. federal courthouse in Washington, U.S., February 20, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)

Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer and the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Kahn, was sentenced to 30 days in prison on Tuesday and must pay a $20,000 fine for lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Rick Gates.

“What I did was wrong. I apologize to my wife and my family,” van der Zwaan said in court Tuesday prior to receiving his sentence from Judge Amy Berman Jackson in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. “I await your judgment.”

Worth noting, the indictments of Mr. van der Zwaan, Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort are not at all related to their work under President Donald Trump.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team charged Mr. van der Zwaan with making false statements in an interview involving his time working for a law firm hired by the Ukraine Ministry of Justice in 2012. He helped produce a report on the trail of Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko in a larger effort that included the now-defunct Podesta Group.

The firm was once the most powerful Democratic lobbying group in D.C., co-founded by former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and his brother, Tony. They were working with Gates’ mentor Paul Manafort, who briefly managed the delegate hunt for Donald Trump, in an effort to lobby the Clinton State Department.

The court documents state that Mr. van der Zwaan said he “did not know why an email between him and Person A in September 2016 was not produced to the Special Counsel’s Office” and that his last communication with Mr. Gates was in August 2016. It further states he claimed that his last communication with an unidentified “Person A” was in 2014.

However, Mr. Mueller’s team discovered Mr. van der Zwaan spoke with Gates and Person A in September 2016, and that he deleted “and otherwise did not produce emails” requested by the special counsel, to include an email between him and “Person A” in September 2016.

Thus far, Mr. Mueller has chosen not to indict anyone from the Podesta Group for violations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), one of the statutes used to prosecute Mr. Manafort.