Work on Skadden Arps' Ukrainian report, and criminal conviction
Van der Zwaan, who speaks Russian, was one of the eight attorneys[28] who worked on Skadden Arps's 2012 report, commissioned by the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych via Paul Manafort, that defended the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of Yanukovych's rival, the country's former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.[29][13][30][31][5] Van der Zwaan worked closely with Gregory B. Craig in preparing the report, assisting with fact-finding and attending meetings in Ukraine.[22][26] He also served as rule-of-law consultant to the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.[4] In a 2017 interview former United States ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst said that Skadden Arps "should have been ashamed" of the report, calling it "a nasty piece of work".[32]
In February 2018, Special Counsel investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann stated that, as part of Manafort's and Rick Gates's lobbying effort to improve Yanukovych's reputation in the United States, Van der Zwaan took an advance copy of the report in late July or early August 2012 without authorization, and gave it to a public-relations firm working for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice—with one aim being to get the report published in The New York Times—and in September 2012 gave Gates talking points about the report.[25][5][29] Prosecutors also said Van der Zwaan deleted emails sought by the special counsel's office—such as emails between him and Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik (known as "Person A"), including one requesting that Van der Zwaan use encrypted communications and one from September 2016—rather than turning them over to Skadden Arps, which was gathering documents for the special counsel.[2][5][33][34][35]
In a 3 November 2017 interview with Special Counsel prosecutors and FBI agents, Van der Zwaan maintained that his last communication with Gates was an innocuous text in mid-August 2016 and that his last contact with Kilimnik was a 2014 discussion of the latter's family; prosecutors determined instead that he had discussed the 2012 Skadden Arps report with Gates and Kilimnik in September 2016 during phone calls that he surreptitiously recorded.[29][34][6][26] Van der Zwaan acknowledged to Special Counsel investigators in an interview that Gates had told him of Kilimnik's ties to the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a Russian military intelligence agency.[36]
On 20 February 2018, Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to investigators.[5][2][15][6] In his plea, he admitted to email deletions, and to lying when he told investigators that he had only a "passive role in the rollout of the report".[29] The guilty plea did not include an agreement to cooperate with the Mueller investigation.[37]
At his sentencing hearing on 3 April 2018, he was sentenced to 30 days in prison followed by two months of supervised release, and fined $20,000.[38]
He was disbarred by the United Kingdom's Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal on 11 July 2019.[39]
In December 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Van der Zwaan in an eleventh-hour pardon prior to the end of Trump's four-year presidential term.[40] The pardon rescinds his U.S. criminal record, allowing him to legally return to the United States.
