Thomson Reuters
Alex van der Zwaan.
- Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan has been sentenced to 30 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents in the Russia investigation.
- He has also been ordered to pay a $20,000 fine.
- Van der Zwaan is an associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former deputy chairman Rick Gates. He is the first person to be sentenced in the Russia probe.
A Dutch lawyer has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and was ordered to pay a $20,000 fine in connection to the Russia investigation.
The attorney, Alex van der Zwaan, pleaded guilty in February to one count of lying to federal investigators and faced up to six months in prison.
Van der Zwaan was charged with "willfully and knowingly" making "false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations" to federal investigators about his work for the law firm Skadden, Arps, Meagher, & Flom LLP and Affiliates in 2012.
He was also accused of misleading federal investigators about his communications with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's longtime associate who also worked on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Manafort was President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman.
In particular, van der Zwaan was accused of lying to investigators about why he did not provide the special counsel Robert Mueller's office with a September 2016 email between him and another person referred to as "Person A" in the February charging document.
The court filing said van der Zwaan not only spoke with both Gates and the unnamed person about Skadden's report on a Ukrainian politician's controversial trial, but also destroyed evidence Mueller's office was seeking, including the September 2016 email.
Last month, van der Zwaan filed a memorandum requesting a lenient sentence, saying he wanted to be home in time to witness his child's birth. He asked the judge whether he could pay an "appropriate fine" rather than go to jail.
Mueller's office did not indicate what prosecutors thought van der Zwaan's sentence should be, but pointed out in a separate filing that van der Zwaan was an experienced lawyer, and accused him of lying after Gates and Manafort were indicted in the Russia investigation.
Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort speaks to reporters with deputy Rick Gates standing by.
Last month's filing from Mueller's office said it was "pertinent to the investigation" that "Gates and Person A were directly communicating in September and October 2016."
It added that federal investigators had assessed that Person A is directly tied to Russian intelligence "and had such ties in 2016."
The filing continued: "During his first interview with the Special Counsel's Office, van der Zwaan admitted that he knew of that connection, stating that Gates told him Person A was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU," Russia's military intelligence unit.
Earlier on Tuesday, van der Zwaan's lawyers again requested no jail time for their client, and the Dutch lawyer acknowledged that what he "did was wrong."
Unlike other defendants in the Russia investigation, van der Zwaan has not entered into a cooperation deal with Mueller's office.
The special counsel has charged 18 other individuals, including 13 Russian nationals, as part of his investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 US election. The Department of Justice is currently working with the Russian government to extradite the 13 Russian nationals.
Four of the other defendants - Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos, and California resident Richard Pinedo - have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with Mueller.
Manafort has pleaded not guilty to dozens of charges against him.