Oftentimes, the best way to understand a complex news story is through the lens of your own experience. So I’ve got a question for you: When was the last time you traveled to an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to meet up with people who live across the street from you?
That’s exactly what Blackwater founder and Betsy DeVos brother Erik Prince says he did in January of 2017 when he got on a plane and flew to the island nation Seychelles to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, his national security adviser, and George Nader, a financial adviser to the crown prince. Erik Prince knew all of those guys from the UAE. His company had contracts with the crown prince. He’d known George Nader and done business with him for years. The problem is, Erik Prince lives in the UAE! He could have hailed an Uber and been meeting with Zayed al-Nahyan and his henchmen in a matter of minutes, rather than flying all the way to the Seychelles.
But if Erik Prince didn’t have to fly to the Seychelles to meet with his pals from the UAE, then what was he doing there?
Well, according to the aforementioned George Nader, who is now cooperating with the investigation headed up by Robert Mueller, Erik Prince flew to the Seychelles on behalf of Donald Trump to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, a fund manager from Moscow who was there on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Nader arranged the meeting between Prince and Dmitriev and is now telling Mueller’s investigators everything he knows about it.
Nader was arrested by the FBI on Jan. 17 of this year at Dulles Airport on his way to Mar-a-Lago for the big party Donald Trump was throwing for himself on the 20th to celebrate his first year in office. FBI agents served Nader with a subpoena to appear before the Mueller grand jury in Washington, as well as a search warrant. They searched Nader’s bags and seized all of his personal electronics. It is not known if Nader was charged with a crime at the time, or if he has secretly entered into a plea agreement as George Papadopoulos did when he was arrested by Mueller’s agents just 10 days later, on Jan. 27. But it is known that Nader is cooperating with Mueller’s team and has been interviewed by them numerous times. The only reason witnesses are called before a grand jury is if prosecutors believe they have knowledge that a crime has been committed. Nader has appeared before Mueller’s grand jury at least once and maybe more times than that.
Much has been made about the meeting between Erik Prince and Putin’s pal Dmitriev in the Seychelles. Most of the speculation has been that the meeting was intended to set up a so-called back channel between Trump and Putin. But a look at the timeline of meetings between Putin’s people and Trump, as well as the crown prince of the UAE, tells us otherwise. They weren’t setting up a back channel. The meeting in the Seychelles was the back channel, up and running in full operation.
Contacts between Trump’s people and the Russians began as far back as March of 2016 and continued throughout the campaign. But they really picked up speed after Trump was elected in November.
On Dec. 1, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak met in Trump Tower with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and national security adviser-designate Michael Flynn. This was the meeting at which Kushner suggested to Kislyak that they use the communications facilities of the Russian U.N. Mission as a back channel between Trump and Putin. Kislyak was reportedly shocked by the suggestion and called back to Moscow to report the request. This call was monitored by the National Security Agency and was later leaked to the Washington Post, who reported on it. This was the first attempt to set up a back channel by the Trump transition team.
The Trump transition didn’t need a back channel to talk to the Russians. Presidents-elect like Trump receive Top Secret intelligence briefings and are afforded the full cooperation of the United States government, including the Department of State, in order to carry out an efficient transition into office. If the Trump people wanted to talk to the Russians, all they had to do was pick up the phone and call the State Department. They would have set everything up for them. But in recent days former prosecutors have pointed out that back channels are sometimes used when you want to discuss unsavory or illegal business. Was this such a time? Well . . .
On Dec. 8, Carter Page made his second trip to Moscow in 2016.He met with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and Putin’s personal press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. Page had met with Dvorkovich before in June, when he made his first trip to Moscow, a visit sanctioned by the Trump campaign, where he worked as a foreign policy adviser. The first trip by Page to Moscow is now recognized as a back channel contact between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
On Dec. 13, Ambassador Kislyak returned to Trump Tower for another meeting with Kushner, Flynn and Steve Bannon, and this time he brought with him Sergey Gorkov, the director of the Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB). This bank, directly controlled by Vladimir Putin, had been sanctioned by the Obama administration in retaliation against Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and seizure of Crimea in 2014. It was also the bank used by Russian intelligence in an operation that was uncovered in 2013, resulting in the arrest and conviction of the vice president of the VEB Bank’s New York office. Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page was involved with the Russian intelligence agents and was named in the indictment as “Subject A.” The VEB Bank’s New York office was closed and the bank was forbidden to do business in the United States. Gorkov, the bank’s director, is a graduate of the Russian intelligence service academy.
It’s not publicly known what was discussed at the Dec. 13 Trump Tower meeting, but it is known that Putin was intensely interested in getting the Obama sanctions lifted. The VEB Bank was one of the major conduits for moving Russian oligarch money, including Putin’s, out of Russia. Whatever they talked about, Special Counsel Robert Mueller knows all about it, because Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, is cooperating with Muller’s investigation, and has told investigators everything he knows about Trump and Russia.
On Dec. 15, Crown Prince Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE traveled to Trump Tower to meet with Flynn, Kushner and Bannon. The meeting was arranged and attended by the crown prince’s financial adviser, George Nader. This meeting was notable because the crown prince of the UAE did not go through normal diplomatic channels and inform the Department of State of his visit to the United States, as all heads of state usually do. The meeting only became known because the crown prince’s movements were being monitored by U.S. intelligence services. It was at this meeting that the back channel encounter in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev was first suggested.
On Dec. 29, Michael Flynn made or received five phone calls with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn counseled the Russian not to respond too strongly to new sanctions imposed the previous day by the Obama administration against Russia in retaliation for its attack on the presidential election of 2016. Flynn reportedly assured Kislyak that sanctions against Russia would be lifted soon after Trump took office in January. The next day, Putin announced that Russia would take no action in retaliation for the new sanctions imposed by Obama.
Less than two weeks later, Erik Prince was meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles. Dmitriev, like Gorkov before him, was the head of a Russian financial institution that was sanctioned by the Obama administration. The Obama sanctions were making it very, very difficult for Putin’s banks and other investment vehicles to do business in the West. In a period of just over a month, six back channel contacts had been made between the Trump transition team and Russians representing Vladimir Putin.
Nine days after Erik Prince had his back channel meeting with Putin’s man Dmitriev in the Seychelles, Trump took office. Twenty days later, on Febr. 9, Trump would pick up the phone and make his first phone call to Vladimir Putin. Finally, the two men had no need of the back channels they had used for months.
But there was a problem. On Jan. 26, Trump and his White House counsel had been informed by Acting Attorney General Sally Yates that their national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had lied to the FBI when questioned about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn had told the FBI he hadn’t talked to Kislyak about the Russian sanctions, when, in fact, he had. Yates told the White House that NSA intercepts proved that Flynn had told Kislyak that Trump would lift sanctions as soon as he took office.
The White House knew its national security adviser had committed perjury, and that the lies he told involved Russian sanctions. The Washington Post got ahold of the story. Flynn would be fired within days. Trump had taken pains to insure he wasn’t seen to be in contact with Putin. He and his people lied over and over and over again that there had been no contacts with the Russians. But now that the days of the back channels were over, and the phone lines were open between Putin and Trump, his hands were tied.
Trump couldn’t be seen to be lifting sanctions on Russia soon after he took office, not when the secret contacts between his campaign staff and the Russians were now being revealed. There would be too many questions. Why lift sanctions so soon? What was the United States getting in return? Would Russia stop backing Ukrainian separatists and return Crimea? What was in it for the U.S.? What was in it for our ally, the Ukraine?
It was never about stopping the fighting in the Ukraine and freeing Crimea. It was about Russian banks and Russian hackers and the help Trump received from Russia in his election campaign. Erik Prince didn’t fly all the way to the Seychelle Islands to meet with a bunch of guys from the UAE he could have had coffee with in Abu Dhabi down the street from his office. He flew there to meet with one more of Putin’s money men.
If you think after the meeting in the Seychelles that Erik Prince didn’t report straight back to Donald Trump, and Kirill Dmitriev didn’t report straight back to Vladimir Putin, you’re dreaming. But I’ll tell you who’s not dreaming. Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He’s busy talking to new witnesses about Donald Trump and Russian money.
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