Mehdi Hasan talks about his interview of Erik Prince

Sitting across from the 49-year-old Prince, a former Navy Seal who hails from a hard-right, billionaire family, can be unnerving. He tends not to smile. He has a cold, unbending stare that rarely betrays any emotion. And he likes to speak in short, sharp sentences.

For much of the hourlong interview, in front of a 300-strong audience in Oxford, I pressed Prince on Blackwater’s murderous record in Iraq, his own racist remarks about Iraqi “barbarians,” and his latest “garbage” proposal to privatize the NATO-led war in Afghanistan. (The Pentagon isn’t keen on the latter, though national security adviser John Bolton might be interested.)

Prince, I discovered, seems to have a Trumpian relationship with the truth. He tried to suggest that a car bomb exploded at Baghdad’s Nisour Square “five minutes” before Blackwater guards shot and killed 14 innocent Iraqis on September 16, 2007. I reminded him that there was no such explosion at Nisour Square. He denied that his current company, Frontier Services Group, is planning to build a “training facility” in Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uighur Muslims are being held in Chinese detention camps, dismissing a press release confirming the news as a mistranslation from Mandarin. I had to inform him that the press release was issued by his own company, FSG, in English.

[...]

Prince was grilled by the House Intelligence Committee over a secret meeting he had in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian oligarch described as a “messenger” to Putin by Prince’s friends in the UAE; the meeting was on January 11, 2017, nine days before Trump’s inauguration. “It lasted one beer,” he told me flippantly, in reference to the Dmitriev meeting, which has been described by U.S., European, and Arab officials as “an apparent effort to establish a backchannel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.”

[...]

I couldn’t help but ask the defensive Prince: Did he not worry that Mueller might send him to prison for not telling the truth, as he did with Gen. Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and others?

“Nope,” he replied, giving me that dead-eyed stare once again, “not at all.”

  Mehdi Hasan @ The Intercept

There's always a pardon.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, sent out requests for documents to “81 agencies, individuals, and other entities tied to the president” — including Prince — as part of its sweeping investigation into alleged corruption and abuse of power by the president and his associates.

[...]

Will Prince have better answers for them than he had for me?

You can watch Hasan's entire interview here:



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 3/10: