Mueller examining billionaire Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s phones

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and president’s secretary of education’s brother, is in the special counsel’s cross-hairs.

Prince has repeatedly denied that he attempted to set up a back channel with Russia prior to Donald Trump assuming office. He says he was in the Seychelles last January on personal business.

Robert Mueller is interested nonetheless in reviewing Prince’s communications and seized his phones and computers, as ABC News reports.

Prince has pledged his full cooperation with Department of Justice’s probe.

‘[H]e has spoken voluntarily with Congress and also cooperated completely with the Special Counsel’s investigation, including by providing them total access to his phones and computer,’ a spokesperson for Prince told DailyMail.com.

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and president’s secretary of education’s brother, is in the special counsel’s crosshairs

Mueller and his team are looking into allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Their digging has extended to the period after the November election before Trump’s inauguration. 

The probe has already ensnared several of the president’s former associates, including Michael Flynn, who was briefly the national security adviser. Flynn’s business dealings prior to his work under Trump is what is now under scrutiny.

Flynn initially attracted the attention of the Department of Justice, though, over conversations he had during the transition with the former Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, allegedly about a reduction in U.S. sanctions.

With Barack Obama still in office, that type of offering would have been forbidden.

Prince is similarly being reviewed in connection to a conversation he had with a Russian tied to Vladimir Putin in January in the Seychelles.

The found of the military contracting giant Blackwater, which later changed its name to Xe, told congressional investigators that wasn’t why he made the trip.

His conversation with Kirill Dmitriev, he says, took place ‘over a beer’ and was a chance encounter. 

George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, reportedly told Mueller a different story.

Nader told special council investigators that he set up the meeting between Dmitriev and Prince.

A spokesperson for the Trump supporter who is also the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told DailyMail.com: ‘Mr. Prince has a lot of opinions about the various investigations, but there is no question that they are important and serious, and so Mr. Prince will keep his opinions to himself for now and to let the investigators do their work.’

‘All we will add is that much of the reporting and speculation about Mr. Prince in the media is inaccurate,’ the person said, ‘and we are confident that when the investigators have finished their work, we will be able to put these distractions to the side.’

Mueller may also be interested in Prince’s investments. He told Congress he had ‘zero’ partnerships or investments with Russian nationals.

Prince’s Hong Kong-based security firm Frontier Services Group did have several proposed business deals involving Russian nationals, though, ABC News reports.

One former business associate reportedly told Mueller’s team that Prince also had a previously undisclosed association with Dimitriy Streshinskiy, a Russian-Israeli arms deal and former special forces soldier.

A proposed deal between Prince and Streshinskiy, however, never went through.

Another former Prince associate told the special counsel about a meeting between Prince and state-owned Russian energy firm Rostec. 

Frontier Services Group and Rostec began work on a refinery operation that had been proposed for Tanzania and Uganda. That deal also fell through, ABC’s sources said, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia over its incursion into Crimea.

A spokesperson for Prince noted that ‘any discussions between FSG and those individuals predated the existence of the Trump campaign, and never resulted in any business being done.’ 

 



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