The Seychelles meeting

Joint U.S.-Russian raids to kill top terrorists. Teamwork between an American government agency and a sanctioned Russian fund. Moscow pouring money into the Midwest.

These are just a few of the ideas the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund touched on during his meeting with former Blackwater head Erik Prince in the Seychelles, just weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a memo exclusively reviewed by The Daily Beast.

The meeting between Prince, an influential Trump ally, and Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the sanctioned fund, took place on Jan. 11, 2017, at the Four Seasons Hotel in a bar overlooking the Indian Ocean. George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, was also present.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has looked into the meeting as part of his larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

[...]

Mueller’s team has received information that the meeting was a pre-organized effort to set up a backchannel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin.

[...]

“Why Erik Prince? Why Dmitriev?” said Rep. Jim Himes, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee who questioned Prince. “Why did that meeting happen? Conversations like that happen at the Aspen Institute every single day, but this is obviously something different—this is a hush-hush meeting in the Seychelles that at least one of the participants has been a little bit fuzzy about.”

  The Daily Beast

I'm guessing that has something to do with the fact that Prince was talking with Trump about setting up a secret, private intel company for Trump to get around government intel agencies and to conduct the Afghanistan war.

I really want a Grand Jury indictment of Roger Stone tomorrow, but I'll settle for one of Erik Prince.

I don't see anything in the memos that indicates something objectionable about partnering with Russia, but why did they need to do it on the sly, and with Erick Prince, before Trump was elected?
In fact, aren't citizens prohibited from entering into political agreements with foreign governments?

Evelyn Farkas, an Obama administration Pentagon official who focused on Eastern Europe and Russia, said the proposals in the memo aren’t unusual; in fact, they mirror proposals that Moscow makes regularly.

“It’s nothing new,” she told The Daily Beast. “What is new is that they’re trying to do this through this weird backchannel.”

But the proposal of the task force—the memo’s fifth point—caught the eye of Mieke Eoyang, vice president of the think tank Third Way’s national-security program and a former House Intelligence Committee staffer.

“Number five, that there’s a task force where the Russians are going to participate in figuring out what the policy should be on numbers one through four, that’s really not normal,” she told The Daily Beast. “They call it shuttle diplomacy for a reason: There’s a back and forth on it. But you’re not letting them inside your decision-making loop.”

OK, I didn't catch that little gem.

After publication of this story, representatives of RDIF reached out to The Daily Beast and said Mr. Dmitriev categorically denies the existence of a memo or read out related to conversations that took place in the Seychelles.

That memo that was "exclusively reviewed" by The Daily Beast? That memo doesn't exist? Whatever.