Erik Prince Funded a Covert Effort to Obtain Clinton's E-Mails
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
20 April 19
Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater, a former
private-security company embroiled in controversy surrounding its use of
lethal force against civilians in Iraq, makes a strange cameo appearance in
the redacted version of the Mueller report, which was released on Thursday
morning. Prince, who is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of
Education, is described as having provided some funding for a secretive
effort to obtain Hillary Clintons private e-mails from shadowy operatives
working on the so-called dark Web.
According to the report, Prince provided funding to hire a tech advisor to
ascertain the authenticity of e-mails that conservative activists had
obtained. Prince, who was interviewed by the special counsels team, said
that the cache of e-mails in question turned out to be fakes.
The report, however, details a strange effort by Trump-campaign associates
to hack into Clinton and the Democrats e-mail accounts that paralleled the
Russian plot. According to Mueller, the effort began as early as December,
2015, and ramped up after Trump publicly declared, on July 27, 2016, that he
hoped Russia would find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing from
Clintons private e-mail server. Mueller and his team never interviewed
Trump, but the retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, the campaign aide
whom Trump later appointed his national-security adviser, told them that
Trump repeatedly asked to get Clintons e-mails. According to the report,
Flynn tried to do this by contacting multiple people who might be able to
supply them, including two well-placed conservative operatives, Peter Smith
and Barbara Ledeen.
Smith, an investment banker and Republican donor, had helped finance an
investigation of Bill Clintons sexual relationships in Arkansas, leading to
the 1993 Troopergate scandal. Ledeen, a Republican Senate staffer, worked
for Chuck Grassley. Grassley was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee and one of the fiercest defenders of Trump and critics of the
Russia investigation. Barbara Ledeens husband, Michael Ledeen, had
co-authored a book with Flynn. A spokesman for Grassleys office described
Barbara Ledeens efforts as her private pursuit, rather than an official
effort undertaken by the senators office.
In December, 2015, Ledeen e-mailed Smith a proposal to obtain Clintons
private e-mails, which, she claimed, were classified and had been
purloined by our enemies. According to Muellers report, the proposal
claimed that the Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long
ago, and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could
re-assemble the servers email content. In an account of Ledeens
efforts, the Guardian cited notes by federal investigators that said her
motive was concern for the well-being of her children, who have served in
the U.S. military, and whose safety, she suggested, could have been
undermined if Clintons e-mails had fallen into hostile governments hands.
But, in her e-mails to Smith, as revealed by the Mueller report, Ledeen
appears more focussed on partisan politics. She writes, if even a single
email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign
service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign.
The report shows that, though Smith declined to participate in the project
at first, Ledeen went ahead and obtained a cache of e-mails. After Trump
publicly called for help in getting Clintons e-mails, Smith initiated his
own effort and circulated information about it to members of Trumps
campaign. According to Muellers report, in August, 2016, Smith sent an
email from an encrypted account with the subject Sec Clintons unsecured
private email server to recipients including the Trump-campaign
co-chairman Sam Clovis. Smith reported that he was involved in efforts to
poke and probe on the above, and that the Clintons server had been hacked
with ease by both State-related players and private mercenaries.
Smith set up an L.L.C. for the project and structured it as an independent
expenditure group that, under campaign law, could not coördinate with the
Trump campaign, yet Smith circulated e-mails saying that his initiative was
in coordination with the Trump campaign to the extent permitted by the
law. The New Yorker obtained a document from Smith, from September, 2016, in
which he claimed that he was working with the Trump-campaign representatives
Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, and Michael Flynn, and also with
the Republican National Committee, Judicial Watch, Citizens United, and the
conservative activist James OKeefe. There is no evidence that any of these
individuals were, in fact, working with Smith. But the Mueller reports
depiction of Smith, Ledeen, Flynn, and Princes efforts suggests that Trump
and his immediate campaign orbit were deeply intent on obtaining Clintons
private e-mails during the period when Russia was hacking into them.
In September, 2016, Smith and Ledeen rejoined forces, at which point Prince
provided some of the funding for the operation. Muellers team obtained
files from Smiths computer showing that Smith had documents that WikiLeaks
had stolen from the computer of the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta,
though Mueller found no conclusive evidence that Smith had obtained the
stolen files prior to WikiLeakss public release of them. (Smith died in
May, 2017, in what was ruled a suicide.)
In his remarks prior to releasing the report, Attorney General William Barr
stressed that it is not criminal to disseminate stolen information, such as
the e-mails that the Russians hacked from the Democrats during the 2016
campaign, so long as those spreading the stolen information were not
involved in the initial theft. It appears that the Attorney Generals
definition of the criminal law was narrow and careful for a reasonmany
Trump-campaign supporters were involved in tiptoeing right up to the line.
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