Robert Mueller Just Cold Charging Folks Trump's Never Heard Of Now, Just To Fuck With Him

Mama said knock you out.

We have a feeling part of special counsel Robert Mueller's strategy right now, which could be more accurately described as a "ballet" or a "symphony" or "Virtue and Moir's gold medal-winning free skate last night," is to keep rolling up people Donald Trump has never heard of, to keep the president under the impression that he's safe, he'll never get caught, NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION, THESE OTHER GUYS ARE THE COLLUSION. Trump doesn't care what happens to other people, after all, because he's a selfish asshole.

Those Russian troll farmers? Indicted. Not Trump!

The American who helped them? Pleaded guilty. Not Trump!

And now here is another guy Trump has probably never heard of, who is being charged with lying to the FBI, because for some reason everybody in the Trump-Russia orbit cannot stop lying to the FBI. Who is this goofball? He is Alex van der Zwaan, and he is a lawyer:

The special counsel's office has charged a lawyer who did work for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice with lying to the FBI, according to court filings unsealed on Tuesday.

Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney, is accused of lying to investigators about his interactions with Rick Gates — the former Donald Trump campaign official and longtime associate of Paul Manafort who is also facing criminal charges in the special counsel's investigation — and an unidentified individual referred to in charging papers as "Person A."

Who could "Person A" be? Almost rhymes with "Saul Grundlesnort," but not quite? We are just curious!

Here are the filing papers, if you want to read them. According to BuzzFeed, Van der Zwaan is probably in the process of pleading guilty right this second .

Van der Zwaan's name hasn't appeared in the august pages of Wonkette until now, but his former law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates, has. (Those names all sound like they are snowboarding tricks or maybe different kinds of loogies, don't you think?)

Skadden was retained by the Ukrainian government in 2012 under then-president Victor Yanukovych, to produce a report "proving" his government put former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in jail for legitimate reasons, as opposed to Hillary Clinton "LOCK HER UP!" reasons. Yanukovych is a pro-Russian guy, whereas Tymoshenko totally friend-zoned Russia a long time ago and would rather go steady with the European Union. And who else was working for Yanukovych during that time? That's right, it was Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who are accused, in part, of laundering MILLIONS OF MONEYS they were paid for their pro-Russia Ukrainian work. They also, according to the indictments, allegedly worked as unregistered foreign agents when they lobbied Congress in connection with this report to make their boy Yanukovych look good.

Alex van der Zwaan was on that legal team at Skadden, working on the "That bitch Yulia did Benghazi like a common Hillary" report, and when Mueller questioned him about his interactions with Manafort and "Person A," he lied. He said he hadn't talked to Rick Gates since August 2016, and he hadn't talked to "Person A" since 2014, when in reality he talked to both of them about this report in September 2016, and also "surreptitiously" recorded the conversations. (LOL, Mueller has so many "wire tapps," it is hilarious.) Van der Zwaan also said he lost a certain email between him and "Person A," when he knew full well he deleted it. Naughty!

Another fun fact about Van der Zwaan is that his father-in-law is Ukrainian-Russian oligarch German Khan, the co-owner of Alfa Bank in Moscow. Yes, that Alfa Bank, the one with the weird computer server that only communicated with a Trump organization computer server during the campaign, for reasons the FBI is still investigating. Weird how all these stories keep intersecting, yeah? It's like they're all small parts of one big conspiracy Robert Mueller is unveiling before our very eyes or something!

Gates is in the process of flipping right now, while Manafort is holding out for a hero named Donald Trump to pardon him. So is Mueller unfurling all the charges against Manafort bit by bit, in bite-sized pieces the public can understand, to apply ever more pressure to Paul Manafort to beg for mercy and flip on Trump? Are the allegations in the DODGY DOSSIER about how Manafort is the literal epicenter of the Trump-Russia conspiracy to steal America more true than we ever could have imagined? Who knows, but maybe!

The most important takeaway here, of course, is that this Mueller charge against Alex van der Zwaan definitely does not say Donald Trump colluded, because everybody agrees, even the Democrats, that there's no collusion, no collusion, and no obstruction, it's just a big Russian hoax for why the Democrats lost an election they should have won, because as we all know it's virtually impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College, but Donald Trump did, because he was a great candidate and also too did you see his electoral map?

THE END.

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[ BuzzFeed ]