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As we saw in (chapter B) Erik Prince was every bit the spoiled, peevish prince-much like Jared Kushner or MBS-who seems to think he had condescended a great deal in showing up at all. As noted in (Chapter B) he particularly seemed to resent being asked about his role in disseminating fake news about Clinton’s emails to Breitbart-that at the time he had claimed was from sources within the NYPD.
Seth Abramson points out that Prince’s choosing not to have a lawyer present with him was meant to communicate a giant middle finger to the Committee.
“Erik Prince—Trump advisor; ex-head of a murderous mercenary army; would-be head of Trump’s private spy agency; would-be head of a privatized U.S. army—is a dangerous liar. He just testified under oath. This is a live reading of the transcript.”
1/ Not only did Prince appear without counsel—though he could be charged with a crime for any lie he told—he told the House Intel Committee he had no plans to *hire* an attorney. In the situation he’s in—and given who he is—that statement is actually chilling. I’ll tell you why.
2/ It suggests he may expect a pardon for any misconduct; or is so confident the GOP won’t make him answer any questions he doesn’t want to that he sees no risk of self-incrimination; or that he’s that confident in his skills as a liar; or thinks his misdeeds can’t be uncovered.
3/ What’s important to understand is that for a man this rich—and he’s very, very rich—and a man with so much nefarious conduct in his past—and he’s very, very dangerous—to show up before Congress to testify under oath *without legal counsel* is a *statement*.
“A middle finger.”
Indeed, Prince’s entire testimony can accurately be described as a giant middle finger to the Committee.
“The witness did everything except drop trou and moon the committee. There was a time, and not so long ago, when a person who treated a congressional committee like a group of not-very-competent valet parking attendants would have been introduced to institutional dining for a few months. But this is the present Congress with the present Republican majorities, so Prince looked up from the witness table and saw what he perceived to be a gathering of ambulatory doormats.”
But it was not only an extremely arrogant and disrespectful performance by the Princely Prince. It also may have been a perjurious performance.
“A shady meeting in Seychelles between a Trump associate and a Russian businessman is emerging as a focus in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — and raising questions about whether one participant lied to Congress about it.
“Erik Prince, a Trump booster who is the founder of the private security firm Blackwater, met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian wealth fund manager with ties to President Vladimir Putin, on January 11, 2017, in Seychelles, an island chain off the coast of East Africa. When the encounter was first reported last April, sources claimed the meeting’s purpose was to establish a back channel between the Trump team and Russian officials.”
“Prince denied that allegation, and in November, he testified under oath to Congress that he traveled to Seychelles to pursue a business opportunity “with potential customers” from the United Arab Emirates, who had suggested afterward that he meet with Dmitriev. He described it as an impromptu and short sit-down at the hotel bar and insisted he did not travel there on behalf of the Trump team.
“But Prince’s story is now beginning to crumble. Reporting by the Washington Post and the New York Times indicates that Mueller now has new evidence and a cooperating witness who is allegedly testifying the Seychelles meeting was preplanned to set up communications between the Trump team and Moscow.”
“Prince’s sworn testimony is now under scrutiny. Perjury is a crime, as is making false statements to Congress, even if it’s not under oath (though Prince was). If Mueller’s evidence shows Prince presented misleading testimony to lawmakers, Prince could open himself up to prosecution.”
This witness reported on by the Post and Times is no ‘coffee boy’ either but none other than George Nader-who set up the Seychelles meeting in the first place-and as we saw in (Chapter B) actually pitched a major election collusion proposal to Don Jr and friends at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016 and Jr’s answer was much like the first-better known meeting-with the Russians in June of that year: If it’s what you say I love it.
As we saw in (Chapter B) if until now this second Trump Tower collusion meeting hasn’t garnered the attention of the first it’s because the number signs are wrong-while we think about Russian collusion his offer was on behalf of the Saudis and UAE along with a social media specialist from an Israeli firm.
And that meeting was set up by: yes, Erik Prince. So he perjured himself a lot in front of Congress. While Congress under GOP control has given him a pass Mueller will be a different story. And, indeed, it has been reported that Mueller is looking at the wether Jeff Sessions perjured himself in front of Congress.
UPDATE: In January Prince described his sit down interview with Mueller as ‘worse than a proctology exam.’
There remain a lot of open questions regarding Mueller’s investigation-he certainly seems to have pulled a number of punches. While some Trump co-conspirators were charged with perjury-Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos-others were allowed to skate-like Donald Jr and Prince.
Mueller, of course, not only didn’t compel Trump to testify he didn’t compel his namesake son, Donald Jr, to either while declining to indict Jr under the dubious premise that there isn’t evidence Jr realized he was breaking the law-so ignorance is an excuse? At least if your father is ‘President.’
It has long seemed-and James B. Stewart through painstaking research seems to agree-that while Rod Rosenstein protected Mueller-from being fired and allowed him to finish-the price of Rosensteins’ protection was that Mueller pulled his punches on many fronts-Stewart documents that Rosenstein himself was one of Mueller’s first interviews yet that didn’t make his report. Then there’s the question of wether Mueller was shutdown early.
End of UPDATE.
In any case, the fact that George Nader is cooperating with Mueller means Erik Prince is in-to quote George Bush Sr-deep do do. He may soon lose his crown.
FN: This proved too optimistic-for whatever reason Mueller didn’t seek to indict Prince for his perjury and had limited information from his ‘proctology exam’ in the report.
“George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman who helped organize and attended the Seychelles meeting, has testified on the matter before a grand jury gathering evidence about discussions between the Trump transition team and emissaries of the Kremlin, as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.”
“Last year, Prince told lawmakers — and the news media — that his Seychelles meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, was an unplanned, unimportant encounter that came about by chance because he happened to be at a luxury hotel in the Indian Ocean island nation with officials from the United Arab Emirates.”
“In his statements, Prince has specifically denied reporting by The Washington Post that said the Seychelles meeting, which took place about a week before Trump’s inauguration, was described by U.S., European and Arab officials as part of an effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming administration.”
“Prince told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that he did not plan to meet Dmitriev in Seychelles but that once he was there discussing possible business deals with UAE officials, they unexpectedly suggested that he visit the hotel bar and meet Dmitriev.”
“At the end, one of the entourage says, ‘Hey, by the way, there’s this Russian guy that we’ve dealt with in the past. He’s here also to see someone from the Emirati delegation. And you should meet him, he’d be an interesting guy for you to know, since you’re doing a lot in the oil and gas and mineral space,’ ” Prince told lawmakers.
The two men, he said, spoke for no more than 30 minutes, or about the time it took him to drink a beer.
“We chatted on topics ranging from oil and commodity prices to how much his country wished for resumption of normal trade relations with the USA,” Prince told lawmakers. “I remember telling him that if Franklin Roosevelt could work with Joseph Stalin to defeat Nazi fascism, then certainly Donald Trump could work with Vladimir Putin to defeat Islamic fascism.”
As Abramson points out in his analysis-linked to above-Prince slips when he uses Trump’s name so when he answers similar questions he changes it first to ‘we’ and then to the ‘United States.’
So even based on his likely pretty bastardized version-he claims it was a chance encounter when Mueller found that Prince set up the meeting in advance with George Nader-they discussed Trump’s canard about ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could get along better with Russia’-in theory that’d be all well and good, but not at the price of rigging an election in exchange for conducting foreign policy in Russian rather than American interests.
Some more analysis from Abramson:
18/ Prince’s story—and it *is* a *story*, nothing more—about his meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017 is so absurdly false that I’m just going to paste it in below so we can all bask in the veritable mountains of BS of which it is composed. This is *really* something, folks.
19/ Some context—weeks earlier, a prince from the UAE secretly entered the U.S. to talk to Flynn about bringing nuclear power to the Middle East by dropping all sanctions on Russia and having Russia build the reactors. The cooperation would be called an “anti-terror” partnership.
20/ So when Prince says, euphemistically, “potential customers for my logistics business,” understand that that phrasing is *intentionally* meaningless. The business he was there to discuss had to do with energy issues in the Middle East. But he has *no* intention of saying that.
21/ Then—”weasel words”. The UAE folks “mentioned” (just “mentioned”!) a “guy” (just some “guy”!) who runs “some sort” of hedge fund (what kind? who knows!). Did they have a serious talk? No! Just a quick “meet.”
After all, Dmitriev was *only* there to meet with *other* people.
22/ They met in the hotel bar—just two guys getting a drink!—and “chatted”—nothing serious!—on “ranging” topics—the conversation meandered randomly!—and the *one* sentence Prince remembers from the “chat” is a piece of self-aggrandizing asshole bravado about Trump being like FDR.
UPDATE: Kind of like the friendly, informal August 2, 2016 dinner Paul Manafort had with Konstantin Kilimnik at the Cigar Bar was about nothing serious-ok they discussed Wikileaks’ hacks of the DNC but ‘only informally’ when Manafort discussed it it was not in his role as Trump’s campaign manager, the campaign that Russia was helping in the election. When he handed over 75 pages of detailed polling this was also ‘casual’ as was their discussion of getting rid of Russian sanctions.
Back to Erik Prince and Dmitriev:
23/ The meeting was a “maximum of 30 minutes” (could’ve been way less, who knows!) and “that’s all there is to say” (what more could anyone want, after all?).
“This sort of BS drives prosecutors—both state and federal—up a wall. Flagrantly false to the point of grave disrespect.”
FN: Yet Prince was not indicted for perjury-he did have a proffer agreement with Mueller though that didn’t cover lying to Congress-which both Roger Stone and Michael Cohen were charged with.
24/ Prince says the *only* thing he knew about Dmitriev was that he was a “Russian fund manager”—in other words, what the men from the UAE told him. What he wants us to think is he asked *no questions* and did *no research* on Dmitriev when he was “advised” to meet with him.
No.
25/ Erik Prince is an international operator—he’s run an international mercenary army, wants to build a private international spy agency, and wants to privatize the U.S. military under (presumably) his command.
He *doesn’t meet strange Russian men before getting intel on them*.
The truth is that Prince is very closely involved with Russian collusion-that also includes the Saudis, Arab Emirates, the Qatari, and the Israelis. Abramson lists him as one of the core group of Trump co-conspirators; but then he was also closely involved with Rogue FBI Agent Collusion-chapter A for more.
Indeed, Abramson argues that for the Trump campaign, the National Security team was Trump’s version of CREEP-which as noted in a (Chapter C) Roger Stone had a material part in.
One question: where does Roger Stone fit in all this?
— Expand the Court (@ProChoiceMike) October 15, 2018
While Abramson argues that these are Mueller’s main targets-it’s pretty clear from what even Roger Stone himself says that he’s a target. Abramson also argues the NatSec campaign team was the equivalent of Nixon’s CREEP, he asserts that the real-rather than official-leaders of the NatSec team were: Michael Flynn and Erik Prince himself.
And Prince set up theTrump Tower collusion meeting 2.0 in August of 2016.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this on October, 21, 2018 Cohen has of course been convicted-for among other things, lying about how long he Trump, and Felix Sater worked on the Moscow Trump Tower deal. Remember Cohen was also involved in the fake peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in February, 2017-which was the outcome of Prince’s -and Steve Bannon’s-Excellent Seychelles Adventure.
Whatever Cohen told Schiff and friends the day after his public testimony before Oversight, it’s led to Schiff scheduling a public hearing of Felix Sater next week-March 14.
Sater who was at that meeting can tell us a lot more about Prince’s role and his conversation with Dmitriev and many other facts and details about that meeting as well as the subsequent ‘peace deal’ that came out of it-presumably he’s already told Mueller plenty regarding it.
We haven’t heard much about Prince’s role-or for that matter Sater’s role-recently but that’s about to change.
FN: Actually Sater’s scheduled testimony never happened-Schiff delayed it after Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter then Sater bailed on the rescheduled meeting in the Summer-now the Dems seem to only want to discuss Ukraine-hopefully that will change some with the move to Jerrold Nadler’s committee.