Spying or oppo research? Blackwater boogeyman Prince accused of helping Project Veritas infiltrate political campaigns & unions

8 Mar, 2020 00:18 / Updated 5 years ago

The left is suddenly shocked to find ‘opposition research’ taken to a ‘whole new level’ amid claims that notorious Blackwater founder Erik Prince hired ex-spies to train Project Veritas agents to infiltrate liberal organizations.

Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, recruited both ex-British and American spies to help in undercover operations run by Project Veritas, according to a report from the New York Times. Prince’s activities were discovered through documents from the discovery process in a legal battle between Veritas and the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s labor union in the US.

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The documents show Prince ran a 2017 operation where a former MI6 officer named Richard Seddon made copies of files and secret recordings at a Michigan office for the teacher’s union. Prince also led an operation to infiltrate the 2018 congressional campaign of Democrat Abigail Spanberger. The person planted in the campaign was eventually found out and removed.

The supposed dealings are nothing new to anyone aware of Project Veritas’ history of embarrassing and discrediting Democrats and progressive organizations. The conservative group is famous for undercover videos of mainstream media figures or campaign staffers for left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders.

Veritas founder James O’Keefe did not address the Prince connection directly, but he did maintain that no one directs what his organization covers, which he describes as a “proud independent news organization.”

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While the Times report’s only “shocking” revelation is Veritas’ connection to Prince, the left appears to have found their new boogeyman, or “Bond villain,” as one Daily Beast writer put it.

CNN political commentator David Axelrod even made sure to throw in some further Russia fear-mongering when reacting to the Prince report.

“Techniques Putin would applaud,” he tweeted.

“This whole thing is so goddamned corrupt, I can’t stand it,” Rolling Stone writer Jamil Smith tweeted.

Former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson called the Times’ report “genuinely disturbing.” 

What makes Prince potentially an even more appealing boogeyman is his connection to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, an investigation that ultimately found nothing substantial enough to confirm the conspiracy theories about Trump working hand-in-hand with Vladimir Putin to steal the election.

Prince was asked during the investigation about a meeting he had in the Seychelles islands shortly before Trump’s inauguration. Like most meetings during the Mueller investigation, nothing criminal was found and Prince says he was never talked to again, though he said last year he’d prefer a “proctology exam” to being interviewed by Mueller’s investigators. 

Others, however, saw right through the shock so many liberals expressed online, and found too much irony, recalling the ex-British spy and #Resistance hero Christopher Steele, and his notoriously bogus and largely discredited Trump dossier.

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