Paul Manafort, aka Trump’s G. Gordon Liddy: I Fought the Law and the Law Won
In 2012, Manafort hired Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom, an international law firm, to write a report aimed at determining whether the 2011 trial of Yanukovych’s political rival Yulia Tymoshenko on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power met international legal standards. The firm sent an intermediary, Van Der Zwaan, the Dutch son-in-law of Russian-Ukrainian oligarch German Khan, to Ukraine in 2012 to investigate, according to the Kyiv Post.
That trial was decried as politically motivated by several international observers, including the European Union, but Skadden’s report deemed it fair. Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland condemned the report at the time, calling it “incomplete” and claiming that Skadden’s lawyers “were obviously not going to find political motivation if they weren’t looking for it.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/mueller-van-der-zwaan/553793/
Manafort’s ‘investigation’ into the legitimacy of the 2011 trial seems about as thorough as the House GOP ‘investigation’ into Russian collusion-they declared they’d found no evidence of it, which is mostly because they didn’t look for it. But for Manafort he was being paid by Yanukovych not to find anything wrong with the trial.
“One month later, Mueller’s team accused Manafort and Gates of using “one of their offshore accounts to funnel $4 million to pay secretly” for the 300-page Tymoshenko report. Manafort has denied all of the charges, but Skadden could shed more light on the extent to which Manafort was involved in hiring and paying the firm on Yanukovych’s behalf.”
The infamous and ‘salacious’ -but in many respects quite accurate-Steele dossier again raises its head.
Van Der Zwaan’s father-in-law, Khan, owns Russia’s Alfa Bank along with Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven. The three billionaires sued BuzzFeed News last year over its decision to publish a dossier written by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that alleged, among other things, Alfa Bank’s involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Skadden has represented Alfa in several disputes over the years, according to descriptions of attorneys’ work available on its website. Manafort’s daughter, Andrea, was hired as an associate at Skadden in October 2012—one month after the firm completed the Tymoshenko report. She left Skadden in October 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Prosecutors say Van Der Zwaan told the FBI in November, “in the course of answering questions concerning his work as an attorney employed by” Skadden, that his last communication with Gates was in mid-August 2016 and his last communication with an individual identified only as “Person A” was in 2014. Van Der Zwaan also told the FBI that he didn’t know why an email he exchanged with “Person A” in September 2016 was not provided to the special counsel’s office.
In fact, Van Der Zwaan spoke with both Gates and Person A regarding the Tymoshenko report in September 2016 and recorded the calls, according to Mueller’s team. He also deleted emails sought by both the special counsel’s office and Skadden, including the one between him and Person A in September 2016.