The brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos teamed up with a conservative extremist group known for its deceptively-edited videos designed to take down liberal groups, and recruited former spies to infiltrate progressive and Democratic groups, including one of America’s largest teachers’ unions.
The New York Times on Saturday reported that DeVos’ brother, Erik Prince, “has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.”
Prince is an ex-Navy SEAL officer who founded the private personal mercenary armed services corporation once known as Blackwater.
Not only did Prince work to have operatives infiltrate liberal and Democratic groups, he worked with Project Veritas, the far right wing organization best known for creating deceptively-edited videos that took out the liberal group ACORN.
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“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,” the Times reports, noting that 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.”
That “undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her,” according to the newspaper, which states that both “operations were run by Project Veritas.”
Project Veritas and Prince “have ties to President Trump’s aides and family.”
NBC News National Security Contributor Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI Assistant Director, tweeted, “There are likely numerous criminal violations here, funded in part by Trump.”