Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the most dogged opponent of Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the U.S. Congress, is blasting the Trump administration for using Prince as a shadow emissary for the White House. “He is the kind of unvetted, unscrupulous person that seems to fit very nicely, especially into the kinds of operations that they want done,” Schakowsky said in an exclusive interview for the Intercepted podcast. “This is exactly the kind of person who should be excluded from having anything to do with our government, covert or out in public.” Schakowsky was responding to reporting by The Intercept and the Washington Post that Prince is serving as an unofficial adviser and emissary for Trump and his team. The Post reported on Monday that Prince and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, arranged a meeting in the Seychelles islands “to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.” That followed an earlier meeting in December 2016 with Sheikh al-Nahyan, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and retired Gen. Michael Flynn in New York.

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Last year, The Intercept reported on Prince’s new company, Frontier Services Group, which is based in Hong Kong and has deep ties to the Chinese government. BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston also reported that Prince “has been offering his military expertise to support Chinese government objectives and setting up two Blackwater-style training camps in China.” Roston suggested that Prince’s latest moves “could also risk violating U.S. law, which prohibits the export of military services or equipment to China.” In January, six days after the Seychelles meeting, The Intercept reported that Prince was informally advising Trump. Prince’s wife posted pictures from inside Trump headquarters of Trump and Mike Pence watching the election results. Prince contributed at least $250,000 to Trump’s campaign through a political action committee run by billionaire Robert Mercer. Prince’s mother also contributed heavily to the PAC. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary. “The whole family is quite troubling,” said Rep. Schakowsky, “and now is part of the inner circle, the ruling party, the people with the most influence in the world, in charge of this administration.” On Monday, the Post reported that “the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would likely require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.” The paper stated: “Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant.” A Prince spokesperson told the Post: “Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump. Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?” Prince moved to Abu Dhabi in 2010, amid major scandals involving Blackwater. He built up a private security company there with the support of Sheikh al-Nahyan. Prince’s connections to the royal family in Abu Dhabi combined with their view of Iran as a threat helps explain why such a meeting would be viewed as valuable for the Trump camp. The Trump administration is littered with appointees and advisers who are radical hawks on Iran. Prince has had a long relationship with Vice President Pence and has contributed to his political campaigns for years. As head of the Republican Study Group in Congress, Pence helped organize a Capitol Hill reception for Prince in 2007 after Blackwater water operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Prince is also extremely close to Trump’s consigliere Steve Bannon and did numerous interviews with Breitbart over the years. Last July, Prince told Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.” In another Breitbart interview, Prince endorsed some of Trump’s overtures to Russia, saying: “Think about it: If FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can deal with Stalin to defeat German fascism in World War II, certainly the United States of America could work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. We don’t have to agree with the Russians on everything, or even on a lot, but we can at least agree that crushing ISIS in the Middle East is a very good idea.”

Photo: Tom Williams/AP