UNLOCKED — American Monster — Erik Prince
Tenth in a series on US criminals accelerating global fascism
***The American Monster series is for paid members. Unlocking No. 10 for all subscribers this week. Please consider becoming a paid members to support my work and access all content and receive community invites. This report was originally published on October 26, 2023.***
“We are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed.
“They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military. These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs... master criminals who move between the licit and illicit worlds… They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government.”—Robert Mueller, Iron Triangles Speech, January 27, 2011
Erik Prince has a Hitler Youth haircut — a small detail that on its own would not be his worst offense, but when combined with court documents alleging genocidal tendencies it rings a loud and terrible alarm.
As is often the case, the monsters hide in plain sight.
They’re on Garbage TV with Alex Jones or Steve Bannon — TV sets waving red, white, and blue, but whose operators serve a different flag. They serve the union of christofascism and the Kremlin, the union of fossil fuel interests and foreign enemy states.
What once seemed odd bedfellows until I wrote this report — where the work of Dave Troy and Anne Nelson revealed The Network: The American and Russian Moralists Behind January Insurrection. Once I understood the transnational union of white supremacy, fossil fuel interests, and homophobia — it then became far more clear.
You’ll find the monsters on RT — a Russian state platform familiar to US traitors. Here, security contractor Erik Prince offers the Russians an opportunity to visually link the US capitol and Moscow, as if to legitimize Moscow, as if Moscow isn’t the capital of a mafia state.
It was Prince — former US Navy Seal officer and founder of the disgraced private military company, Blackwater — who came under scrutiny for allegedly trying to make backchannel connections between the Trump administration and the Russians.
His meeting in the Seychelles in January of 2017 with a Putin-linked banker Kirill Dmitriev — head of the state run investment firm Russian Direct Investment Firm — was investigated for being an attempt to set up a secret communication between Trump and Russia. Prince denied this, telling members of Congress it was a chance meeting, a “beer” in a bar, while on other business with UAE officials.
But in his testimony to Congress, he failed to mention he was joined by repeat sex offender and Blackwater lobbyist George Nader — a Lebanese-American businessman with ties to Trump’s orbit.
Nader is currently in prison — he pleaded guilty in 2020 to flying a 14-year-old boy from Europe to the US for sex, and transporting pornography depicting child sexual abuse and bestiality. It wasn’t the first time — he was convicted in the 1990s of transporting child pornography publications, and imprisoned in 2003 for sexually abusing ten boys in the Czech Republic.
The Blackwater lobbyist disputed Prince’s account of the meeting. Cooperating with the Mueller investigation into Trump-Russia, Nader told the Special Counsel that the meeting with Dmitriev had been set up in advance by him.
So the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of his Seychelles meeting with the Russian banker.
“I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with. Homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, Clean Air Act.. (George H.W. Bush admin) has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.”—Erik Prince
Attending Hillsdale College — a private, conservative Christian college in his home state of Michigan — he found George H.W. Bush’s desire for clean air and inclusion too liberal so he began an internship with Dana Rohrabacher.
As Vanity Fair reported in 2018 in a report titled “I’m Tired of America Wasting Our Blood and Treasure”: The Strange Ascent of Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince:
He left that (Bush) job for another, in the office of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who has often been called Vladimir Putin’s top Capitol Hill asset, so valued, the Times has reported, that he was given a Kremlin code name.—VF
“He went to Dana Rohrabacher’s Super Villain Academy and all these monsters graduated from it, including Elon Musk,” said High Fidelity, my podcast partner on RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation. “Prince has his fingers in so much destruction around the world. He became a walking war crime.”
As I listened this weekend to Jack Bryan’s new podcast, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, I thought how much amoral men profit off of death and destruction. It’s like, if there’s money to be made, they just wrap themselves in the flag and the bible — and claim greed in the name of God.
“They think they're the Lords of War,” said HiFi. “They think that Jesus will absolve them of their bloodletting, forgetting the fact that it says thou shalt not kill. The problem with Erik is that he doesn't just weaponize his skills against America's enemies. He weaponized his skills against America.”
Killing In the Name Of
In probing court documents in the aftermath of the Nisour Square massacre of unarmed Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees contracted by the US military on September 16, 2007 — in which 17 people were killed and 24 wounded — there is much that is unsettling.
Anonymous declarations by ex-Blackwater employees describe informant murders, human trafficking, and threats of death and violence.
One informant said that Prince “views himself a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”
According to a Mother Jones report titled “Assassinations, Weapons Smuggling, Wife-Swapping—The Latest Accusations Against Erik Prince and Blackwater”:
The declarations were filed in conjunction with a series of civil cases brought on behalf of Iraqi civilians suing the company for war crimes and wrongful death. Court documents filed by the plaintiffs have accused the company of a range of criminal activity, from murder and kidnapping to tax evasion and child prostitution.
According to John Doe 2’s declaration, “Mr. Prince knowingly hired two persons who were previously involved in the Kosovo sex trafficking ring to serve at relatively high-levels within his company.” He adds that “Mr. Prince’s North Carolina operations had an ongoing wife-swapping and sex ring, which was participated in by many of Mr. Prince’s top executives.”
“You can't be a normal person and run a mercenary army that commits war.”—High Fidelity, RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast
Our other podcast partner, investigative reporter and technologist Jim Stewartson wrote about the history of Prince’s “Catholic Fascism” here:
In an interview with podcaster Audiomagnate, the son of Stewart Rhodes — the founder of the Oath Keepers currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy against the United States and other charges related to the Insurrection — said that if January 6 would have succeeded, the Oath Keepers would have become the paramilitary arm “under a junta run by Michael Flynn” and “his backers, who would be in charge of the country.”
“Stewart would have been answering to Michael Flynn and Erik Prince,” said Dakota Rhodes.
Prince’s wealthy family donated hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative think tanks — pushing for privatization, reduced regulations, bolstering an anti-gay agenda and an anti-women’s bodily rights agenda. Prince did the honorable Christian thing and married his pregnant nanny — impregnated by him while his wife Joan was dying of cancer.
His sister Betsy DeVos spent four years as part of the Trump administration championing religious education from her perch as Secretary of Education, while recommending guns in schools and reversing protections for transgender students.
Super Villains
Prince, who heads the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group and served as chairman of Frontier Services Group until 2021, has also been linked to Project Veritas — a far-right activist group that infiltrates Congressional campaigns, media groups, labor groups, and non-profits.
According to a New York Times report, Prince recruited “former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic Congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda.”
In 2018, when I worked on a Congressional campaign to remove Dana Rohrabacher from Congress, a malinformation campaign was run against me to destroy both my professional reputation and my personal life.
It was a coordinated operation. I have worked multiple campaigns since then, and I describe each one as going to war.
American monsters are trying to overthrow democracy. Those of us on the frontlines get in the way of their greed, corruption, and treason.
American Monsters: And Then There Were Nine
***The American Monster series and accompanying podcasts are for paid members. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.*** And then there were nine… Below is a compilation of the first nine American Monsters, and it’s truly an American horror story.
As I have written about these monsters, it has become clear to me that by not holding high-level criminals accountable for their crimes against country and humanity, they pose not only dangers to our nation but to the world.
The slaughtering of civilians in Baghdad in the Nisour Square Massacre resulted in the conviction of four Blackwater employees for murder, manslaughter and firearms charges.
The lack of conviction for a lifetime criminal — Donald Trump — resulted in the pardoning of these criminals. UN human rights experts reported that the pardons “violate US obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at the global level.”
Today, those who attempted to overthrow our country on January 6 celebrate. One of their christofascist own — a Louisiana Congressman who ran unopposed, played a key role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, refused to certify Biden’s victory even after the attack on the Capitol, pushed conspiracy theories, took money from the Russians, and refuses to fund the war in Ukraine — was named Speaker of the House. He was celebrated on Russian TV.
The new Speaker — Mike Johnson — is not fit for purpose. Unless his purpose is to destroy liberal democracy. Another Christian crusader promoting white nationalism, white nationalism the precursor to genocide.
‘Othering’ — the prelude to fascism.
Erik Prince is a brain scrambled psychopath who loves making green off of red.—High Fidelity
In one of the most remarkable seven minutes in broadcast news history, Keith Olberman went all in on describing the crusading criminality of Erik Prince.
Olberman reported it was all in the name of “greed” and “God”.
Perhaps offering to supply weapons, drones, and mercenaries to a Libyan militia commander seeking to overthrow the government — according to UN investigators — was one bridge too far.
A confidential UN report delivered to the Security Council earlier this year revealed that Prince deployed “mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, and cyberwarfare capabilities” to Libya during fighting in 2019 — a violation of the Libyan arms embargo.
As the New York Times reported:
As part of the operation, which the report said cost $80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form a hit squad that could track down and kill selected Libyan commanders.
The sheer breadth of evidence in the latest U.N. report — 121 pages of code names, cover stories, offshore bank accounts and secretive weapons transfers spanning eight countries, not to mention a brief mention of a Hollywood friend of Mr. Prince — provides a glimpse into the secretive world of international mercenaries.
Prince denied the UN report, referring to himself in third person, like Little Caesar, from his home in Abu Dhabi.
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To read the full American Monster series, go here:
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