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erik prince
'Monstrous Human': Erik Prince Reportedly Charging $6,500 for Seats Out of Kabul
The Blackwater founder previously pushed the Trump administration to privatize the Afghan war.
Aug 25, 2021
Blackwater founder Erik Prince on Wednesday faced fresh accusations of being a war profiteer in response to reporting that he's charging $6,500 per person for a seat on an evacuation flight out of Kabul.
The reporting by the Wall Street Journal comes amid ongoing evacuations from Afghanistan of civilians, including at-risk Afghans, and follows President Joe Biden's Tuesday statement he still wants an August 31 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
The Journal said that "chartered planes are flying out of Kabul with hundreds of empty seats," further reported that Prince would put an additional charge to get those trapped in their homes to the airport. However, it was unclear he had the capability to execute the flights.
\u201cFor context, that piece of absolute shit, Erik Prince is charging $6500 per person to evacuate them from Afghanistan.\u201d— Fred (@Fred) 1629906074
"After making millions of dollars off the Afghanistan war, Erik Prince is back at it, exploiting people's desperation for cash," tweeted journalist Maria Abi-Habib. "Prince is charging $6,500 a person to get people out of Afghanistan while planes organized by NGOs leave Kabul empty."
Prince--the brother of former President Donald Trump's billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos--previously pushed Trump to privatize the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Last year, Trump pardoned four contractors of the now-defunct Blackwater who were convicted of killing over a dozen unarmed citizens in Baghdad's 2007 Nisour Square massacre. Earlier this year, a United Nations report accused Prince of violating an arms embargo by sending weapons to Libyan warlord and former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar.
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'This Is Bonkers': Right-Wing 'Spies' With Deep Pockets Infiltrated Democratic Party Across West
"Wyoming's far-right promotes tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories," said one of the operation's targets. "It makes sense that they would use spies to try to attack their opposition or uncover some imagined liberal plot."
Jun 25, 2021
In a "bonkers" report that drew comparisons to a movie script or Tom Clancy novel, the New York Times on Friday exposed a sophisticated right-wing plot to infiltrate Democratic politics in three Western states using undercover operatives.
"The use of spies is an escalation of tactics by Wyoming's political far-right."
--Better Wyoming
"Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump," revealed journalists Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti.
Despite some "bumbling and amateurish" tactics, the now-married couple at the center of the report connected with political figures and groups in Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming in an operation the reporters pieced together through a review of federal election records and over two dozen interviews.
The full scope of information that the spies may have gained access to is not clear, but they attended various events--including a fundraiser at which one of them was photographed with Tom Perez, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee--and have now generated concerns about the possibility of other right-wing operatives and operations across the U.S. political system.
\u201cThis is bonkers https://t.co/vXSbyX2hnl\u201d— Maggie Haberman (@Maggie Haberman) 1624621509
The expose includes some characters from Goldman and Mazzetti's previous reporting on covert right-wing operations to "discredit" Trump's enemies and infiltrate groups "hostile" to the ex-president's agenda: war profiteer Erik Prince--founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater and brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos--and former British spy Richard Seddon.
As the Times explains:
Mr. Prince had set Mr. Seddon's work in motion, recruiting him around the beginning of the Trump administration to hire former spies to train conservative activists in the basics of espionage, and send them on political sabotage missions.
By the end of 2018, Mr. Seddon secured funding from the Wyoming heiress, Susan Gore, according to people familiar with her role. He recruited several former operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas, where he had worked previously, to set up the political infiltration operation in the West.
The "spies" exposed in the report are Sofia LaRocca, 28, and Beau Maier, the 36-year-old nephew of conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Maier's mother worked at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming, where Seddon trained Project Veritas operatives in 2017, before leaving the group the next year.
Seddon, Maier, LaRocca, Gore, and the heiress's attorney did not respond to the newspaper's requests for comment, including questions about campaign contributions. "Straw donations" in which donors are reimbursed for contributing to a political campaign are illegal under federal law.
\u201cThis should be a much bigger story. This is an extremist movement. Look how at the extent to which they are willing to subvert democracy and our institutions. \nhttps://t.co/Zzz0S49ckz\u201d— Wajahat Ali (@Wajahat Ali) 1624647900
LaRocca secured a job at the Wyoming Investor Network (WIN), a consortium of rich liberal donors that quietly supported some moderate Republicans. Chris Bell, who worked as a political consultant for the consortium, told the Times that "getting the WIN stuff is really damaging" because "it's the entire strategy. Where the money is going. What we're doing long term."
Maier, an Army veteran who fought in Iraq, met with Democrats and Republicans--including Eric Barlow, who is now the Wyoming speaker of the house--about medicinal use of marijuana, "which he said was particularly valuable for war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder."
Barlow, who said he was open to medical marijuana and decriminalization, called himself a "practical Republican," and told the Times that "for some people, that's a RINO." Trump and other right-wingers use the term, which means "Republican in Name Only," to attack more centrist members of the GOP.
Maier and LaRocca also went on double dates with Karlee Provenza, a Democrat elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives last year, and her now-husband Nate Martin, executive director of the group Better Wyoming, which released a statement on the report Friday.
\u201cPolitical spies with ties to the Wyoming Liberty Group, Project Veritas, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince targeted Better Wyoming as part of a yearlong operation to gather intel and make secret recordings to weaponize against the organization. https://t.co/Gcxa7AW32Z\u201d— Better Wyoming (@Better Wyoming) 1624621976
The statement highlighted the financing from Gore--who had been involved in the state's GOP politics since the 1990s and founded the Wyoming Liberty Group in 2008--and shared that Maier and LaRocca donated thousands of dollars to Better Wyoming.
"The use of spies is an escalation of tactics by Wyoming's political far-right, which already employs anonymous websites, purity tests, smear campaigns, and has secretly recorded Better Wyoming staff members in the past," the nonprofit said.
Martin, in the statement, said that "the use of spies is pretty far out there, but so are many of the Wyoming Liberty Group's ideas... Wyoming's far-right promotes tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories like Medicaid expansion causes abortion and cannabis is ruining the daycare industry. It makes sense that they would use spies to try to attack their opposition or uncover some imagined liberal plot."
The Better Wyoming leader also addressed the social relationship he formed with the spies.
"The whole time, they were lying to my wife and me about who they were and what they were up to, and they were actively trying to get us to say or do things that could ruin our careers and hurt us," Martin said. "Politics aside, that's just a disgusting thing to do to other people. But, again, the people who hired them support policies that defund public schools and block folks from getting healthcare, so it's pretty clear they don't care much about people to begin with."
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Prince Redux: The Family's Imprint Is Still Being Felt
It’s hard not to marvel at their staying power.
Mar 05, 2021
It was deja vue all over again.
--Attributed to Yogi Berra
They're still with us--the Prince family that is. It's hard not to marvel at their staying power. Those with long memories will recall the great trump friend and cabinet member of the trump administration Betsy Dee Prince. By the time we got her, of course, she was married, and was known as Betsy De Vos. She was especially distinguished since she was one of the few trump appointed cabinet secretaries who managed to hang on to her position for the four years the trump was living in the White House.
Throughout the trump White House years, she was the Secretary of Education. In that capacity she did so many great things for the education of wealthy children that it is hard to recall them all. A couple of her more recent ones, however, serve as good examples of her efforts on their behalf. During the second month of the COVID 19-pandemic in 2020, she demanded that public schools reopen in the fall. She said that if they didn't she'd send their money to private and religious schools. In May she used federal coronavirus relief funds to create a $180 million voucher program for private and religious schools.
The good works of Betsy and her family were not limited to helping private and religious schools. In May 2020 it was disclosed that Betsy and other family members had funded the Honest Election Project. Its goal was to fight efforts to expand vote-by-mail options in the 2020 elections. Betsy's brother, Erik Prince, was also involved in assorted companies that were engaged in non-education ventures. One of them was Blackwater USA.
In its early incarnation, Blackwater USA was a training facility for special operations personnel. In its later years its operations were expanded to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among services rendered, a Congressional Report found, Mr. Prince's employees at Blackwater Worldwide were involved in almost 200 shootings between 2005 and 2007 in Iraq. Not all of the shootings were directed at enemy combatants. Among the non-enemy shootings was a December 24, 2006 shooting of one of the men guarding Iraqi Vice President, Adel Abdul Mahdi. He was killed by a drunk Blackwater employee.. On February 4, 2007, an Iraqi journalist was killed by another Blackwater employee. On September 9 five people near a government building were killed by one of the Blackwater employees; three days later five people were wounded by Blackwater employees, and four days after that seventeen Iraqis were killed by Blackwater employees in Nisour Square. As a result of that last shooting, four of the men involved were tried in the United States. One of them was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of murder and three of the men were convicted of manslaughter and weapons charges. All were pardoned by the trump in the blissful waning days of his White House tenure.
Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 after he settled federal investigations into its activities in Iraq by paying $42 million in fines. Notwithstanding the hefty fines it paid for the conduct of its employees during their years in Iraq, the overall operation was profitable for Erik. Over the course of its operations Blackwater billed the United States Government more than $1 billion for services it had rendered. Ridding himself of Blackwater has not, however, removed Erik from having an interest in military matters in that part of the world. On February 26, 2021 it was reported that Erik is once again under investigation for his military activities although no longer in Iraq or Afghanistan. According a recently released United Nations report, he has selected a new venue. It is Libya.
A United Nations panel of experts began investigating Erik's activities in connection with his possible participation in activities that were violations of an extant arms embargo on Libya. As a result of that investigation, the panel prepared a report that has been viewed by assorted sources that are now disclosing the report's conclusions. Among other things the report concludes that Erik helped arms suppliers evade an arms embargo that was imposed on Libya by the United Nations. The New York Times reported that Erik had, among other things, furnished weapons and a force of armed mercenaries to a militia commander whose goal was to overthrow the extant government in Syria. According to the New York Times the forces were exceptionally well equipped. They were armed with gunboats, attack aircraft and cyberwarfare capabilities. The operation provided by Erik reportedly cost $80 million which seems like a lot until you recall that when he disbanded Blackwater he had paid $42 million in fines which, in the Prince scheme of things, suggests those large numbers may be large but they're not intolerable.
It is not now known whether Erik will suffer any adverse consequences as a result of the report. His reaction to the report was not surprising. He denied all its conclusions. As he said to one reporter: "My name has become click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together. And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it's pretty damn sickening." Some might conclude that comment by suggesting to Erik: "So is your conduct."
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