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Alex van der Zwaan (left) arriving at court today Alex Wong/Getty Images

Dutch lawyer becomes first person sentenced in Trump-Russia probe

Alex van der Zwaan has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $20,000.

A DUTCH LAWYER with direct knowledge of contacts between Russian intelligence and a top official in Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign has become the first person sentenced in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Alex van der Zwaan was today sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $20,000 (about €16,300) fine after pleading guilty to lying about his contacts with former campaign deputy Rick Gates and a former Russian intelligence official.

Van der Zwaan, a Dutch national with Russian roots and son-in-law of a prominent Russian tycoon, was a lawyer in London for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in 2012 when he carried out work for the Ukraine government through Gates and Gates’ close associate Paul Manafort.

In 2016, after Manafort became chairman of Trump’s election campaign and took Gates as his deputy, van der Zwaan and Gates both had communications with a person they knew as a former official of Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, prosecutors said.

According to the FBI, court documents say, that individual — identified as “Person A” — “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016″.

Van der Zwaan lied to investigators on several occasions about his contacts with both Gates and “Person A”, prosecutors said.

After his lies were called out, van der Zwaan began cooperating with investigators, including sharing recordings of his conversations with Gates, “Person A” and with a senior Skadden partner.

Case adds to pressure on Trump 

While the details of those conversations remain secret, court documents suggest they support the idea of more extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election than the White House has admitted.

Van der Zwaan faced up to five years in jail.

He earned a light sentence based on his cooperation with Mueller’s probe, which is focused on whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

US intelligence agencies say Russian President Vladimir Putin himself was behind a hacking and disinformation effort to disrupt the election and boost Trump’s chances of winning.

Mueller’s team has kept most of the details of what van der Zwaan told them secret. So it remains unclear whether his information supports collusion allegations. But the case adds to the rising pressure on Trump, his family and top aides from the probe.

Mueller’s team, formally known as the Office of the Special Counsel, said in a filing that “van der Zwaan is in an unusual position of having information related to the office’s investigation that is not widely known — including information that he knows first-hand due to his role in the conduct the office is investigating”.

Manafort-Moscow links eyed 

Mueller, a former FBI director and federal prosecutor, was named last May to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

So far his team has issued indictments of 19 people, including Gates and Manafort, and 13 Russian nationals, including a close associate of Putin, who were involved the effort to use social media to interfere in the US election.

With specific authorisation from the US Justice Department, Mueller has probed deeply into the work Gates and Manafort did for Russia-allied former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych between 2006 and 2014.

The investigation has reportedly focused on Konstantin Kilimnik, a former agent of Russia’s GRU intelligence agency who was based in Kiev and worked with Manafort and Gates during that period.

Kilimnik has told US media that those contacts continued when Manafort took the lead in Trump’s campaign in 2016, including as a go-between for Manafort and Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin associate.

The Washington Post reported last year that in a July 2016 email Manafort offered Deripaska briefings on the presidential race during the campaign.

In a court filing yesterday, Mueller defended his expansion of the probe to cover Manafort’s Ukraine work.

One of the first charged by Mueller, Manafort has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of money laundering, tax evasion, bank fraud and lying.

Facing the same charges, in February Gates reached a plea deal with Mueller’s prosecutors.

He agreed to cooperate in exchange for pleading guilty to one charge of lying and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, relating to unreported offshore bank accounts.

© AFP 2018 

Read: ‘It’s like we have no border’: Donald Trump vows to deploy military to the US-Mexico border

Read: Josepha Madigan to lead Fine Gael’s campaign to repeal Eighth Amendment

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:15 PM

    This is like McCarty era in 1950′s a witch hunt of anybody associated with Russia….Mass hysteria from CNN….The Mullier enquiry will go on for another 7 years while Trump is president….

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    Mute Larry Doyle
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:29 PM

    @pc_comments: Lying to the FBI is a serous crime and always has been.

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    Mute Drian Buffy
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:32 PM

    @Larry Doyle: So we can expect Hillary to be imprisoned anytime now over her emails?

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:33 PM

    @Drian Buffy: No because having some e-mails is not lying to the FBI.

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    Mute Philip G Roark
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:53 PM

    @Drian Buffy: HRC cooperated with the FBI. The FBI investigated. The FBI found nothing. But go ahead and deflect from the traitors in the Trump campaign/White House.

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    Mute Philip G Roark
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:00 PM

    @pc_comments: Congratulations on yet another false equivalency meant to deflect from the current situation, and one that happened 60 years ago. BRAVO! So far we have 4 arrests by Mueller, convictions and plea deals too, based on evidence and testimony of those involved. So there’s that. How many convictions, plea deals, etc, during McCarthyism?

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    Mute Larry Doyle
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:18 PM

    @pc_comments: The only thing Mueller’s enquiry has in common with McCarthyism is the willingness of some weak people to name names.

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    Mute Gav Quinn
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:53 PM

    @Larry Doyle: Yeah cos you know more about the investigation than the FBI after 10 mins on social media. Derp?

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 11:58 PM

    @Gav Quinn: hey pot, you leave that kettle alone!

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    Mute Michael farrelly
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    Apr 4th 2018, 6:22 AM

    @pc_comments: the net is closing in on trump and very quickly

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    Mute David Knight
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    Apr 4th 2018, 11:22 AM

    @Drian Buffy: And what crime would she be arrested for? Can you specify the actual offence? Because she was investigated twice and found to have no case to answer.

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    Mute Seán Ó Briain
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:45 PM

    The first of many to fall.

    The Russian fake accounts are already here to try create doubt and spread misinformation.

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    Mute PutinBot 5002
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:51 PM

    @Seán Ó Briain: Sure we’re all Russian here mate. You are the only Irish poster on this site.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:04 PM

    @PutinBot 5002: your sarcasm doesn’t change the fact that newly created fake accounts post specific pro-russian posts on Russia related articles on here all the time. Click on their accounts and they are already deleted.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:11 PM

    @Seán Ó Briain: If I might jump in here, don’t you think it’s possible that the reason you see so many new accounts is down to the journal banning people for wrong think? That’s why I’ve had to make a few in my time.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:14 PM

    @PutinBot 5002: What did you do to make Michael/Angela/Open Borders/ Cultural Marxist etc. so annoyed that he had to clone your profile?

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:16 PM

    @Thought Criminal: Tariq/Gráinne Abdulaziz, etc. etc. etc. etc. (Jesus, he has some amount of them, the fruitcake)

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:51 PM

    @(not real)PutinBot 5002: Pathetic doesn’t cut it for you man. You’re an embarrassment to weaklings everywhere. Cloning profiles. FFS.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:07 PM

    @Thought Criminal: Who knows. He’s a whiny little bitch.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:51 PM

    @Thought Criminal: Oh, by the way, wanna hang out sometime?

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    Mute Comer Thomas Norman
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 11:47 PM

    @Seán Ó Briain: you’re spot on there Sean. I see pro Russian comments all the time, too obvious and too badly written to be anything other than professional trolls. If these morons had any brains at all, they’d be dangerous. Pathetic, sad, transparent waste of lives, all of them.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:22 PM

    Person A is Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort and Gates preceding the 2016 election campaign. Why doesn’t the article make the connection? When he was linked to Manafort during the election, Manafort was fired from the campaign.

    You wouldn’t be doing much if you expected the MSM to give you proper details these days.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:51 PM

    @Jimmy Ryan: The FBI wanted to be sure 100% of the connections Them and the Obama administration did not want to be seen as putting their thumbs on the scale of the election, though Comey did that with his inane reopening of the nothingburger known as the Hillary e-mail scandal.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:18 PM

    @Philip G Roark:

    I’m not linking anything between the Obama administration and Manafort. During the election cycle,the Washington Post highlighted that Paul Manafort had links with Konstantin Kilminik, who was suspected of links to Russian intelligence. Manafort was fired by the Trump campaign due to that story.

    Person A in the legal document is Konstantin Kilminik. I don’t see why the MSM is not reporting this. Kilminik was an associate of Manafort, Gates, Skadden, the Podesta Group and many more due to lobbying work they done in Ukraine, Russia and other places around the world. This type of lobbying work preceded the election and continues to this day.

    With respect to all the legal documents, I can’t see how any of this is anyway related to Russian collusion in the election campaign. Mueller seems to want to use this area of inquiry to flip Manafort and get him to highlight possible collusion evidence if it exists.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:58 PM

    I’m sitting here at home in Mum’s basement on the couch, in between my life-sized Trump and Putin dolls, and I just can’t believe this is happening. MSM is out of control.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:12 PM

    @(not the real)PutinBot 5002: You need assessment and appropriate help.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:30 PM

    @Thought Criminal: Ya think?!

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:26 PM

    @WànkBot 5002: Why do you keep impersonating my accounts, you total weirdo. I’m flattered and all but still, pretty lame and cringy dude.

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    Mute Michael Knight
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:45 PM

    @PutinBot 5002: Hey man, not this again. Please stop impersonating my account! And tell your BF to back off.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:47 PM

    @Michael Knight: You messed up there big time again. 101 is my best friend, we are both super clever and smartest.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 11:03 PM

    @Michael Knight: My god… you truly are an idiot…

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    Apr 4th 2018, 12:17 AM

    @PutinBot 5002: We won’t tell them about the 500 PutinBot accounts we have set up on Twitter, tee he he!

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    Mute Gav Quinn
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:50 PM

    What is it with Dutch lads and hair gel..?

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 9:53 PM

    @Gav Quinn: It looksh very shlick.

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    Mute gregory
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:56 PM

    @Gav Quinn: With a smart suit and tie it’s the bizz

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    Apr 4th 2018, 12:18 AM

    @Gav Quinn: And Don Jr. too.

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    Apr 3rd 2018, 11:34 PM

    Anybody else think he looks like Max Headroom?

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    Mute Michael Lang
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:14 PM

    Lawyers play an extensive role in power braking, influence peddling and go betweens for clandestine contacts.

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    Mute Larry Doyle
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 8:32 PM

    @Michael Lang: Not so much anymore if they start being imprisoned.

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    Mute gregory
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:55 PM

    @Michael Lang: The idea that hundreds of millions of Americans are somehow under the thumb of Vladimir Putin is as ridiculuous as the journalists who purport the plausibility of this idea. You do know people are smarter than we think right?

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    Mute Seamus Mc Meel
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    Apr 4th 2018, 9:41 AM

    @gregory: You haven’t spent much time in America,so…

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    Mute David Knight
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    Apr 4th 2018, 11:26 AM

    @gregory: 50 million votes for Trump would tell you that you are over-estimating the smartness of people.

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    Mute Dessie Deratta
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:12 PM

    So, the Deep State has their first victim.

    They really should have “resolved” Trump BEFORE he was elected…but like the rest of the Establishment they believed Killary was a slam dunk till it was too late!

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    Mute gregory
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    Apr 3rd 2018, 10:50 PM

    So a Dutchman is responsible for how US people vote. w t f ? Do we voters have no responsibility how we vote? Sorry i am an idiot, read the wrong website or book cancel my vote please. Has the world lost its senses entirely? Are we all idiots?

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    Mute Philip G Roark
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    Apr 4th 2018, 2:14 AM

    @gregory: Nope. Just you.

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    Mute Michael farrelly
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    Apr 4th 2018, 6:26 AM

    @gregory: what are you babbling about ?

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    Apr 4th 2018, 9:42 AM

    @gregory: Yes we are,yes we are.

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    Apr 4th 2018, 1:46 AM

    AMERICA…….fcuk Yeah.

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