Tag: George Nader

Did Erik Prince lie to Congress?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Blackwater founder Erik Prince cites East India Company as a model to privatize Afghanistan war: The White House is considering using Prince's approach -- and he's making the media rounds to pitch it to Trump

Sounds like it! Via Talking Points Memo:

Most recently, a blockbuster New York Times report published Saturday detailed how Prince personally arranged and attended an August 2016 meeting between foreign emissaries and Donald Trump’s eldest son. At the meeting, Prince told Donald Trump Jr. that “we are working hard for your father.”

The Times report provides new evidence that Prince may have knowingly perjured himself in his congressional testimony. Lying to Congress is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, but it is rarely enforced.

Prince’s interview focused primarily on a January 2017 trip he took to the Seychelles, ostensibly to meet with officials from the United Arab Emirates, and a conversation he had there with a Russian banker allied with Vladimir Putin. In his testimony, Prince downplayed the trip, saying it was primarily an opportunity to discuss business prospects with the UAE’s government and characterizing his conversation with the banker, Kirill Dmitriev, as a chance encounter. Prince insisted that he was not there as a representative of the incoming administration.

In Prince’s account, his contact with the Trump campaign was limited to semi-regular text exchanges with Steve Bannon, providing a few unsolicited papers on Middle East policy, and donating money.

That does not appear to be accurate.

George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who serves as a top adviser to the UAE, has told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the Seychelles meeting was actually a planned effort to set up a secret communications backchannel between the Trump transition team and Russian government, according to reports.

In sworn statements, Nader, who is now a cooperating witness, said that he helped orchestrate the meeting specifically so that Prince and Dmitriev could discuss relations between the two countries.

This is pretty big

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in the Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back-channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

In January, 2016, Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to President Vladi­mir Putin, and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.

A witness cooperating with Mueller has told investigators the meeting was set up in advance so that a representative of the Trump transition could meet with an emissary from Moscow to discuss future relations between the two countries, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

I have to say, the pace of these stories makes me feel like my head’s about to explode…