President Trump has repeatedly (and, oftentimes, erroneously) claimed that recent congressional committee and court decisions have determined there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. According to a new report, however, the mounting evidence seems to suggest otherwise. The latest bit of news comes from Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney who pleaded guilty to lying under oath to Robert Mueller’s team about his connections to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Per the attorney’s testimony, Gates reportedly knew he was communicating with an ex-Russian intelligence officer during his time with the campaign.
According to CNN, the revelation centers around the former Russian intelligence officer, whose name wasn’t given in a court filing by prosecutors:
That Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort’s companies, were in touch in September and October 2016 was “pertinent to the investigation,” a court filing from prosecutors said Tuesday night.
The acknowledgment that Gates knew the person had Russian intelligence ties is alleged in a report prosecutors filed about the coming sentencing of… Alex van der Zwaan, who worked with Gates and Manafort previously [and] pleaded guilty last month to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators about his interactions with Gates and the unnamed person.
Gates pleaded guilty to charges brought against him by the special prosecutor’s team in February, agreeing to cooperate with the investigation for leniency. Even so, whether or not his cooperation with Mueller has resulted in any more details about the unnamed ex-intelligence officer pointed out by van der Zwaan remains to be seen. Per a recent Politico story about Gates’s involvement in the investigation (and what he may or may not be saying about his time on the Trump campaign), his guilty plea “has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.” As one Republican consultant told the outlet, “Gates saw everything.”