Erik Prince recruits ex-spies to help infiltrate liberal groups
The security contractor is the brother of education Secretary Betsy Devos
Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, in recent years has helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligencegathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.
One of the former spies, an ex-mi6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the nation. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Seddon’s role in the teachers union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle
between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Prince’s role in recruiting Seddon for the group’s activities.
Both Project Veritas and Prince have ties to President Donald Trump’s aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Trump’s agenda.
Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of education Secretary Betsy Devos, at times has served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with former national security adviser Michael Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops. Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.
Prince appears to have become interested in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives in espionage tactics sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reaching out to several intelligence veterans — and occasionally using Seddon to make the pitch — Prince said he wanted the Project Veritas employees to learn skills like how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings, among other surveillance techniques.
James O’keefe, the head of Project Veritas, declined to answer detailed questions about Prince, Seddon and other topics, but he called his group a “proud independent news organization” that is involved in dozens of investigations. He said that numerous sources were coming to the group “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”
“No one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate,” he said.
A spokesman for Prince declined to comment. Emails sent to Seddon went unanswered.
Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws. Last year, the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of his meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January 2017.
Once a small operation running on a shoestring budget, Project Veritas in recent years has had a surge in donations from both private donors and conservative foundations. According to its latest publicly available tax filing, Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018. O’keefe earned about $387,000. The group also has become intertwined with the political activities of Trump and his family. The Trump Foundation gave $20,000 to Project Veritas in 2015, the year that Trump began his bid for the presidency. The next year, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed without substantiation that videos released by O’keefe showed that Clinton and President Barack Obama had paid people to incite violence at rallies for Trump.
In a book published in 2018, O’keefe wrote that Trump years earlier had encouraged him to infiltrate Columbia University and obtain Obama’s records.
Last month, Project Veritas made public secretly recorded video of a longtime ABC News correspondent who was critical of the network’s political coverage and its emphasis on business considerations over journalism. Many conservatives have gleefully pounded on Project Veritas disclosures, including one particularly influential voice: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.
The website for O’keefe’s coming wedding listed Donald Trump Jr. as an invited guest.
Prince invited Project Veritas operatives — including O’keefe — to his family’s Wyoming ranch for training in 2017, The Intercept reported last year. O’keefe and others shared social media photos of taking target practice with guns at the ranch, including one post from O’keefe saying that with the training, Project Veritas will be “the next great intelligence agency.” Prince had hired a former MI6 officer to help train the Project Veritas operatives, The Intercept wrote, but it did not identify the officer.
Seddon regularly updated O’keefe about the operation against the Michigan teachers union, according to internal Project Veritas emails, where the language of the group’s leaders is marbled with spy jargon.
They used a code name — Libertyu — for their operative inside the organization, Marisa Jorge, who graduated from Liberty University in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges. Seddon wrote that Jorge “copied a great many documents from the file room,” and O’keefe bragged that the group would be able to get “a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment.”
The emails refer to other operations, including weekly case updates, along with training activities that involved “operational targeting.” Project Veritas redacted specifics about those operations from the messages.
In August 2017, Jorge wrote to Seddon that she had managed to record a local union leader talking about Devos and other topics.
“Good stuff,” Seddon wrote back. “Did you receive the spare camera yet?”
As education secretary, Devos has been a vocal critic of teachers unions, saying in 2018 that they have a “stranglehold” over politicians at the federal and state levels. She and Prince grew up in Michigan, where their father made a fortune in the auto parts business.
AFT Michigan sued Project Veritas in federal court, alleging trespassing, eavesdropping and other offenses. The teachers union is asking for more than $3 million in damages, accusing the group of being a “vigilante organization which claims to be dedicated to exposing corruption. It is, instead, an entity dedicated to a specific political agenda.”
O’keefe and his group have taken aim at targets over the years including Planned Parenthood, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Democracy Partners, a group that consults with liberal and progressive electoral causes. In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners using a fake name and fabricated resume and made secret recordings of the staff. The year after the sting, Democracy Partners sued Project Veritas, and its lawyers have since deposed O’keefe.
In that deposition, O’keefe defended the group’s undercover tactics, saying they were part of a long tradition of investigative journalism going back to muckraking reporters like Upton Sinclair. “I’m not ashamed of the methods that we use or the recordings that we use,” he said.