You remember Blackwater (now called Academi), right?

Erik Prince left Blackwater in 2010, but he's been anything but quiet.

When he's not giving testimony to Congress about why he's meeting Russian bankers, he's busy giving the Trump Administration ideas.

For instance, let's privatize the war in Afghanistan.



Prince calls his proposal “A Strategic Economy of Force.” It entails sending 5,500 contractors to Afghanistan to embed with Afghan National Security Forces, and appointing a “viceroy” to oversee the whole endeavor.

"An East India Company approach," Prince wrote in the Wall Street Journal. As if that was a good thing.

Prince was shameless about his reasoning.



One surprising element is the commercial promise Prince envisions: that the US will get access to Afghanistan’s rich deposits of minerals such as lithium, used in batteries; uranium; magnesite; and "rare earth elements," critical metals used in high technology from defense to electronics. One slide estimates the value of mineral deposits in Helmand province alone at $1 trillion

So, OK. That idea didn't fly.

But Prince wasn't discouraged. He came up with an even better idea.



The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

An off-the-books, private spy agency, answering only to a megalomaniac. What's not to love?

It turns out that Prince thinks mercenaries can fix absolutely everything.



Erik Prince, the founder of the American private military company Blackwater and a major donor to President Donald Trump, is proposing a privately-trained police force that he believes would solve the trafficking crisis in Libya.

Now you might be thinking, "What does Erik Prince know about how American spy agencies work?" It turns out, more than he should.



With CIA Director Mike Pompeo promising to make his agency more “vicious,” the Trump administration has elevated to a key White House position a CIA officer who, according to two sources, once worked on a secret CIA assassination program meant to target terrorists.

At the time, the sources say, the program was contracted to Erik Prince, the controversial security contractor whose sister is Donald Trump’s education secretary.

Isn't that comforting.

Now you might be thinking, "Prince should just shut up." But then you don't know Prince very well, because he's got bigger plans.



The latest recruit in former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's war against the Republican establishment is, at least on the surface, an unlikely candidate to ride a populist wave to a Senate seat in Wyoming.

..But, at a time of rising grassroots frustration with Republican leaders in Washington, Prince's status as a political outsider and a proven Trump loyalist — he advised the candidate, he pumped $250,000 into his coffers, and his sister is Trump's education secretary — makes him intriguing to a wing of the GOP that isn't afraid to back candidates who have baggage.

Senator, and war criminal, Erik Prince.

It just rolls off the tongue, don't it?