A new filing from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team released Tuesday night alleges that Rick Gates communicated with a former Russian intelligence officer while he was working for the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
The revelation came in a sentencing memorandum for Alex van der Zwann, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in February and has been cooperating with Mueller’s team. As a lawyer at the firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLC, van der Zwaan worked on a report for Gates and Paul Manafort on the Ukrainian government’s prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, a political adversary of Gates and Manafort’s client.
In documents previously released when van der Zwaan pleaded guilty, prosecutors said that van der Zwaan worked with a “Person A” on the report and that van der Zwaan was in communication with Gates and “Person A” in the fall of 2016.
In the Tuesday night filing, prosecutors said that “Person A” has “ties to the Russian intelligence service” and had those ties in 2016. Van der Zwaan told the special counsel’s office that Gates told him that “Person A” was a former Russian intelligence officer, according to the filing.
As van der Zwaan’s February guilty plea revealed, Gates called van der Zwaan in September 2016 and asked him to contact “Person A” — Gates was concerned about possibly facing criminal charges in Ukraine. Gates also sent van der Zwaan a preliminary criminal complaint in Ukraine, according to prosecutors. Van der Zwaan then called Person A, made a separate call to a senior partner at the law firm, and then followed up with Gates again, according to the guilty plea filings.
Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and making a false statement in February and is cooperating with Mueller’s probe. The special counsel dropped all other charges against Gates when they reached a plea deal. Manafort has maintained his not guilty plea to two federal indictments against him stemming from his work in Ukraine.
Paul Manafort's longtime employee, Russian-Ukrainian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he and Manafort emailed each other "about Trump and everything" during the campaign.
Kilimnik's comments came a day after The Washington Post reported that Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman at the time, sent Kilimnik an email in July 2016 asking him to offer Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska "private briefings" about the campaign.
"There were millions of emails," Kilimnik told RFERL in a text message. "We worked for 11 years. And we discussed a lot of issues, from Putin to women."
"Of course we discussed Trump and everything," he said in another message. "A lot of things."
Manafort had written a cryptic note to Kilimnik, who has been scrutinized by US federal investigators for suspected ties to Russian intelligence, shortly after being named a campaign strategist in April.
"How do we use to get whole?" Manafort wrote.
Jason Maloni, a representative for Manafort, told The Washington Post that Manafort had simply been trying to leverage his high-level role on the campaign to collect past debts.
Kilimnik seemed to echo that statement, telling RFERL that "our clients owe us money."
"Is there any violation of the law or proof of my work for KGB or whoever in those discussions?" he asked, according to RFERL.
But it was Manafort who, according to Russian billionaire Deripaska, owed him money — not vice versa.
Legal complaints filed by Deripaska's representatives in the Cayman Islands in 2014 said he gave Manafort $19 million in previous years to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable. The project fell through, and Manafort all but disappeared without paying Deripaska back, the filings claimed.
Kilimnik insisted that "on the political side there is no case that can be made about my involvement in the US elections," according to RFERL.
"They are tough investigators and probably will get Manafort for some financial crap," Kilimnik said, in reference to the FBI. "With that many years of international clients no one can be 100% clean."
Manafort's lobbying work on behalf of Ukraine's pro-Russia Party of Regions and his business dealings with Russian entities has been under scrutiny by the FBI since at least 2014. He finally registered as a foreign agent in April under pressure by the Justice Department, but the focus on him as only increased since special counsel Robert Mueller took over the Russia investigation in May.
Since then, the FBI has also conducted a raid on one of Manafort's homes in July, in search of tax documents and foreign banking records. Mueller threatened to indict Manafort following the raid, according to The New York Times.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is reportedly helping Mueller investigate Manafort for possible financial crimes and money laundering. The IRS's criminal-investigations unit has been brought onto the investigation to examine similar issues.
Court documents do not identify Person Al, but those familiar with Paul Manafort's and Gates' associates suspect he is Konstantin Kilimnik.
Konstantin Kilimnik
PAUL MANAFORT’S UKRAINIAN PROTÉGÉ
Konstantin Kilimnik (also Kostya or KK) is a Russian Army-trained translator possibly tied to Russian intelligence, who reportedly worked for Paul Manafort in Ukraine. Politico calls Kilimnik Manafort’s Kiev-based protégé and says the two men first connected in 2005. They worked together for both Russian-allied Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the Opposition Bloc, a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. According to Politico, Kostya told people he visited the United States and Manafort as recently as Spring 2016, the same time Manafort was helping Trump through the Republican primaries.
A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan to 30 days in prison for lying to federal investigators in the first criminal sentence to result from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
Van der Zwaan, who was also ordered to pay $20,000 in fines, pleaded guilty in late February to making “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations” to the special counsel’s office and FBI agents.
According to the indictment, van der Zwaan lied about his contacts with Trump campaign official Richard Gates and a Ukraine-based business associate of both Gates and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He then tried to cover his tracks by deleting emails that the special counsel's office had requested.
Press reports have identified the businessman as Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer and a longtime associate of Gates and Manafort.
The London-based lawyer has no known ties to the Trump campaign, but in a court filing last week, prosecutors allege that van der Zwaan and Gates knowingly had discussions with Kilimnik during the final months of the election. Prosecutors said the communication “was pertinent to the investigation.”
Kilimnik has denied involvement with Russian intelligence.
In a court filing on Monday, prosecutor Andrew Weissman said van der Zwaan, the son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, is in “an unusual position of having information related” to the Russia probe that “is not widely known — including information that he knows first-hand due to his role in the conduct the Office is investigating.”
Several other Trump campaign associates have also pleaded guilty to various charges stemming from the special counsel investigation, including Gates, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. They are all cooperating with prosecutors.
None of the charges so far directly relate to the issue of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. But according to a heavily redacted court filing released late Monday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Mueller the green light to investigate allegations that Manafort colluded with Russia to swing the election.
Manafort has been indicted on numerous charges of fraud and money laundering and pleaded not guilty to all of them. He has not been indicted on any charges related to election interference.
The charges against van der Zwaan centered on work he did at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on a 2012 report about the trial of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
According to Mueller’s team, van der Zwaan worked closely with Manafort and Gates on the report, which defended the handling of Tymoshenko’s trial by the Russia-aligned government of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The State Department criticized the report as a deceptive assessment of the Yanukovych government's conduct and Mueller's team has accused Manafort and Gates of funneling $4 million to secretly pay for it.
Skadden, a powerful New York law firm, has said it fired van der Zwaan last year and is cooperating with the investigation.
Van der Zwaan’s precise value to the Mueller investigation remains unclear.
But Weissman in his Monday filing asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson to limit public access to his case records, arguing that “requests filed by someone with non-public information could, themselves, suggest to third parties investigative facts that are otherwise not widely known.”
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