FBI is Investigating Trump Insider Erik Prince Over Possible Illegal Arms Sales, Money Laundering and Contacts with Foreign Intelligence Agencies

Editor's Note: I wrote this exclusive story last Friday for Washington Babylon on Substack -- please subscribe here, there are paid and free options -- and am publishing it here at LinkedIn today with minor changes. Enjoy.

Erik Prince, the founder of the the private military company Blackwater, has been under investigation by one federal agency or another, a foreign government, or the United Nations almost nonstop since 2007, when a group of his employees killed 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad. He is once again, as the FBI has an investigation open now regarding possible illegal arms sales and money laundering by Prince, sources with direct knowledge of the situation told me.

Prince has been indicted and charged in the past, and his companies have been fined, but he’s never been convicted of a crime. There’s no way to know if this time will be any different – or, I need to emphasize, if the present allegations are true as I have no direct evidence that shows that – but the feds are said to be pursuing the case aggressively. Whatever the ultimate outcome, it’s worth keeping an eye on how things develop with the latest investigation as Prince, the brother of former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, is a major Republican donor and was an unofficial advisor to his victorious 2016 campaign when he defeated his challenger, the epicly hapless Hillary Clinton.?

If Trump defeats Kamala Harris in November and returns to the White House next year, Prince, who has close ties to MAGA World heavyweights such as Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone, would once again have a seat in the inner circle. Prince was seen holding court at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he was the main attraction at a dinner at a local steakhouse hosted by Personnel Policy Operations – motto: “We Arm, Prepare, and Defend Conservative, America First Public Servants” – which included a conversation about “the threat of political lawfare.”?

Prince’s name has even been floated as a possible Secretary of Defense in a Trump II administration, though at first glance that seems a highly unlikely proposition. He also has close ties to the far right abroad, as I wrote about recently for The New Republic and at Washington Babylon.

FBI investigators, who are said to be interested in several of Prince’s associates, including his close friend Christiaan Durrant, an Australian fighter pilot who’s reportedly worked alongside him on a number of overseas adventures, seem to be focused on a trio of issues, all which have been previously mentioned in news reports and in several cases have been part of past probes by the US government, foreign governments, or the United Nations. The three topics are:

• Illegal weapons shipments to a rebel militia leader in Libya in violation of an international embargo.

This prong of the investigation is related to Prince’s reported participation in a plot to aid Libyan militia commander Khalifa Hifter during his attempt to overthrow the country’s internationally-recognized government in 2019. A United Nations report released two years ago accused Prince of violating an embargo on arms shipments to Libya by supplying aircraft, other weapons and foreign mercenaries to Hifter, a former Libyan military officer who became a CIA asset when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ruled the country, and who eventually grew rich in the oil business. Hifter was a “good friend” of the agency, a former senior agency official who knew him well told me, and was involved in attempts to destabilize, assassinate, and overthrow his government before and after moving to the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington in the 1990s.?

Hifter later returned to Libya and played a key role in the US-backed overthrow of Gaddafi – who was captured and killed after being toppled – in 2011. He was accused of committing war crimes during the revolt he helped lead against the Libyan government eight years later, when Prince is said to have been one of his key benefactors. In a reversal of past US policy, then-President Trump endorsed Hifter’s attempt to topple the government, and the New York Times later reported that Durrant, who it said was working with Prince, “made several calls to the main White House switchboard in late July 2019, after the mercenary operation ran into trouble,” though it wasn’t clear who he was trying to reach or if he got through.

One of the matters the FBI is looking into are allegations that Prince had a role in arranging for attack aircraft to be flown through Jordan and on to Libya as part of his efforts to assist Hifter, one source told me. Prince’s alleged role was reported by The Intercept, the New York Times, and other outlets in 2021, though there are conflicting details in the various accounts and it’s not clear if all or any of the planes found their way into Hiftar’s stockpiles.

• Money laundering profits from the Hifter operation.

The 2021 United Nations estimated that the plan to aid Hifter cost $80 million, though who precisely was behind it, the names of all the participants, and who paid for it aren’t entirely know. It’s been widely speculated that a sizeable chunk of the money came from the government of the United Arab Emirates, where Prince has lived and made a fortune on deals to protect the ruling monarchy and the country’s oil installations, which long supported Hifter.

One of the sources told me the FBI is trying to determine if Prince? laundered money he received for his alleged role in the scheme, which was codenamed “Project Opus,” and failed to report the payments on his tax returns to the IRS.

• Contacts with foreign military services and intelligence agencies, including in China and Russia.

The sources I spoke to weren’t certain of the specfic charges the FBI is looking into, but they are similar to what’s been previously published in media accounts and in investigative reports of Congress’s Trump-Russia probe. For example, in 2017 the Washington Post and The Intercept reported, as summarized by the latter, that shortly before Trump’s inauguration in January of that year, Prince traveled to the Seychelles “and met with a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin” and “presented himself as an unofficial envoy of Trump.” The meeting “was brokered by Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi,” with the goal of establishing “a backchannel between the president-elect and Putin.”

Last year, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security put Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, which Prince founded and led until 2021, on an export control list for allegedly training Chinese military pilots, as Reuters reported. Frontier denied the allegations and stated it had “no ongoing relationship” with Prince, though it also said he owned as much as five percent of the company’s stock shares. Furthermore, some of his close associates still work at the firm, including J. David Whittingham, a vice president and head of the Africa division. Durrant worked as an aviation specialist at Frontier Services Group, according to ABC News of Australia.

I was told the FBI was looking into other dealings, of a more direct and extensive nature, with foreign military and intelligence agencies, which would be the most damning of the charges the FBI is pursuing – if true. As noted earlier and I’ll repeat again, I have no direct evidence that implicates him in anything the feds are probing.?

Furthermore, Prince has vociferously denied all prior allegations of wrongdoing related to these and other charges, which include attempted bribery of Iraqi officials and other alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; diverting cropdusters modified for military use to Sudan; and supporting a plan to train members of Project Veritas to spy on liberal groups in Wyoming. I messaged Prince early this morning to get his input for this story, but haven’t heard from his thus far. If I do, I’ll provide an immediate update.

In closing, it’s important to note that Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr has been accused by the Washington watchdog group CREW, among others, of giving preferential treatment to the former president’s allies in federal investigations and exerting pressure on the FBI and Department of Justice on their behalf. According to CREW, which made the allegation against Barr in a statement the group issued in 2020, among those who benefited were Flynn, Stone, and Prince. The latter was reportedly under investigation then for making false statements to Congress during the Russiagate probe, and additionally for some of the same reasons Prince is now during the waning days of the Biden administration.?

My sources didn’t know why the FBI resumed pursuing the same allegations that were shut down during the Trump years, nor could I find a definitive answer to that question. Obvious possibilities would include the Bureau believes the earlier investigation was shut down for political reasons, as CREW alleges, or that new information has surfaced during the subsequent four years that merited a fresh look, which led to the new probe being launched earlier this year.?

Another potential explanation, which I suspect Prince would tend to believe – and which doesn’t seem any less plausible than the first two – is that he’s being politically targeted by the Biden administration because of his close relationship to Trump. I was told the FBI was working with great speed on the investigation, in part because it believes if Trump wins the November election before it completes its work, the inquiry will be quickly killed after he takes office. That doesn’t prove Prince is being singled out on political grounds, but it could be interpreted as supporting evidence for that supposition.