Last week, Blackwater founder Erik Prince has stepped back into the limelight. In an interview with The Daily Caller, Prince is calling on U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a formal investigation into the Obama administration’s reported surveillance of Americans who met with foreign officials.
He requested Sessions to launch a formal investigation into his case, where Obama administration officials “unmasked” him and later leaked what he called false information to the news media.
“This is an abuse of an intelligence service’s powers. It is dangerous. This is a problem for American liberty,” Prince said.
Prince founded Frontier Services Group, which supports Chinese investments in oil and gas resources in Africa after selling his shares in a private paramilitary empire that was awarded $2 billion in government security contracts from 1997 to 2010. In an August op-ed in The New York Times, Prince advocated for turning Afghanistan’s geopolitical landscape over to private military contractors.
In its April article, the Washington Post claimed that Prince was in the Seychelles Islands Jan. 11 as part of an elaborate conspiracy by then President-elect Donald Trump to establish a secret, back-channel to Russian President Vladimir Putin, relying solely on unnamed sources. The Seychelles is a remote archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean. (Video Below)
“The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi¬mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump,” the Post reported.
Prince refuted the report while claiming that he was “unmasked for political purposes.”
“The thing that really bothers me is I was unmasked for political purposes to The Washington Post,” the businessman cited.
Prince’s version of the meeting did not take place over two days; he revealed that was over a beer at a restaurant at the island’s Four Seasons Hotel.
“I was there for a business meeting to see some Emirates,” Prince recalled. The reference to Emirates describe citizens of the UAE.
“They said, ‘there’s this Russian guy in town on some Russia-Emirates related business,’” he recalled. “I met him. I think the meeting lasted five or ten minutes and that was it.”
“We talked about the Russian business climate, where we thought oil was headed price-wise and how much he thought Russia would like to do business in America,” said Prince. “It had nothing to do with national security, the Trump campaign, or anything else.”
Former White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice admitted during a private testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last September that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials who met in New York with the UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan.
Those unmasked were former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former Campaign Advisor Steve Bannon, and Trump’s son-in-law and White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner.
“I’ve had on numerous times when I lived in the Emirates that my rights as a citizen were violated. I would meet with an Emirate official and minutes later, they would get a phone saying, ‘why are you meeting with that guy?’ That’s just not America. This was America under the Obama intelligence groups. That’s disgusting,” he said.
Currently, the House Intelligence Committee is investigating the matter. On Friday, former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power arrived on Capitol Hill for an interview with House investigators.
The Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, however, declined to comment on whether the unmasking campaign was part of its investigation.
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Article Sources: The Daily Caller, Observer, The Daily Caller/Facebook Photo Credit: Vanity Fair Video Credit: MSNBC/YouTube
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