Who's Who in Off Leash, Erik Prince’s Previously Secret Group Chat

Members include the man who gave Stormy Daniels’ cell phone number to Trump. Prince invited to RFK Jr. to join, but he says – convincingly – he never saw it and doesn’t know Prince or why he sent it.

Stuart Seldowitz, who was on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama was not a name I expected to see on the list of invitees. Screenshot from local news report, from YouTube.

Identifying the roughly 400-plus members of Off Leash, the secret WhatsApp group chat Blackwater founder and MAGA world insider Erik Prince created last December, was a long and laborious process. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I initially had the phone numbers but not the names of the people Prince invited to join the group chat, which I exposed yesterday in the New Republic. 

I also obtained extensive excerpts of Off Leash’s discussions, but many of the posters used a handle, which sometimes was only a single letter or two. Fortunately, a number of those people gave themselves up in their posts to the group chat due to extraordinarily bad OPSEC.

To cite one example, I was extremely eager to identify a poster with the handle “PH” because the opinions he expressed made clear his sympathies lay with flatout fascism, unlike centrist and radical Communist members – in the context of Off Leash, anyway, where the spectrum ranges from ultra conservative on the left to clinically insane and Crypto-Nazi on the right – of the group chat. “The globalists want to control the entire planet [and] the only chance to get rid of them is a spark from a great power (the USA),” PH wrote in one post, which I cited in the New Republic story. “Surely there will be a strong man like Erik who will initiate it, otherwise there is no chance of regaining our freedom.”

I didn’t know who PH was until he responded to a post directed to him by another group chat participant by writing, “Hi, yes I`m here, Potra H.” It was short work from there to determine this was Horatiu Potra, a Romanian mercenary who, like Prince, has had recent dealings in mineral-rich, conflict-plagued Democratic Republic of Congo.

By now, I’ve positively ID-ed almost all of the people who’ve participated in the group chat’s discussions and the majority of those Prince invited to Off Leash. The small sampling of names I’ve provided below, a few which I disclosed in the New Republic article, include active participants and invitees. Not all of the latter have posted to the group chat, and among those some told me they’d never seen Prince’s invitation and weren’t aware they were on the membership roll, and in the case of a few others I haven’t seen evidence that indicates they knew.

I’ve listed invitees as well as participants – while making clear who are among the former group and who are among the latter – because the fact that Prince offered them a spot in Off Leash suggests they are part of his political and business network’s trusted inner circle. In most cases, I found independent confirmation of that. 

That’s not true of everyone in the group chat, but everyone Prince invited is in the contacts of the cell phone he used when he established the WhatsApp group, and that cell phone appears to be one where he keeps the names of particularly intimate associates. That in itself is interesting because it means Prince either discussed political, social or professional matters with them in the past or got their numbers because he hoped to in the future.

A third reason I listed the names of invitees as well as active members is that quite a few have had noteworthy roles in government or, like Prince, are influential political and national security insiders. Some had positions when Donald Trump was president and could be appointed to important jobs in his second administration if he wins the November presidential election, which he’s as likely to do today as he was yesterday before the ruling at the Stormy Daniels hush money trial.

There are some exceptions when it comes to possible employment in a Trump II administration. The most obvious of that is the first person I’ll mention below, who in addition to being a Democrat is so toxic that the chances of his ever landing another job in government are near zero.

Stuart Seldowitz

A former acting director of the National Security Council’s South Asia Directorate under President Barack Obama and deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs, Seldowitz was arrested last November for serially harassing an Egyptian-born New York City food vendor for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

More recently, Seldowitz was a senior consultant with GDC Inc., a New Jersey-based logistics company owned by Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana, a close friend and business associate of Prince. Whether or not that’s how he ended up in the group chat, he clearly knows Prince because he greeted him in one of his two posts to Off Leash that I’m aware of. 

Last year looks to have closed in brutal fashion for him, as would be expected under the circumstances. “Merry Christmas to all from a Packer bar in Hell’s Kitchen,” he wrote in the second post on the afternoon of December 24 during a Green Bay-Carolina Panthers football game. It’s not clear if Seldowitz was alone, drunk and weeping into a glass of cheap bourbon at the time, but, hey, dreams cost nothing.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There’s no question Prince invited him to the group, but RFK Jr. told me via text message he didn’t see the invitation, had no idea he is included on the list of group chat members, which he was until at least a few days ago, and doesn’t know Prince. I have found no reason to doubt him, so I’m taking him at his word and assuming he received an invitation because, as appears to be the case with at least a few others, Prince didn’t carefully vet the names of all the people he sent one. 

However, it still begs the question – though it’s fundamentally about Prince, not RFK Jr. – as to why the former had the independent presidential candidate’s phone number in the first place. Among the possibilities are the two men had a passing encounter or brief conversation RFK Jr. forgot about, or, more likely, Prince got his phone number because he thought it might be useful to have in the future.

Keith Schiller

A former NYPD detective who was hired to be Trump’s bodyguard in 1999 and director of security for The Trump Organization five years later, Schiller was named Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Oval Office Operations in 2017. CNN described him as "one of Trump's most loyal and trusted aides.” Soon after resigning his position in September of 2017, the Republican National Committee awarded his company KS Global Group LLC a $15,000 per month contract, allegedly to provide security consultation in preparation for the GOP’s 2020 presidential convention, though possibly for other reasons that rapidly spring to mind.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump reportedly used Schiller’s cell phone to call his unofficial campaign adviser and long time black bag operative Roger Stone, because he didn’t want anyone other than his closest advisors to know he was talking to him. Prince was regularly in touch with Stone during the same period, including about sensitive campaign operations such as a “payload” the latter was awaiting shortly before ballots were cast, which apparently was a reference to WikiLeaks’ imminent release of Hillary Clinton’s hideously embarrassing emails. Stone was later found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks. 

In November of 2017, two months after he stepped down from his White House job, Schiller told the House Intelligence Committee during its investigation into Russiagate that an unnamed Russian offered to send five women to Trump's hotel room during their 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, but the offer was rejected. When Prince was asked if he knew Schiller when he testified before congress about Russiagate, he replied, “I don't know who that is.”

That’s curious for many reasons, one being that Schiller wasn’t called to testify at the Stormy Daniels trial – despite having obtained her phone number for Trump and inviting her to dinner with him – but the last four digits of his own cell phone number were revealed during the proceedings because she had it. They’re the same last four digits of the number Prince sent Schiller’s Off Leash invitation to, so it’s all but certain it’s identical to the number Stormy had. 

An image introduced at the Stormy Daniels trial. Photo from Twitter.

The only possible conclusions are that Prince met or got the number for Schiller – who hasn’t participated in Off Leash as far as I can tell – after he testified before congress; that he completely forgot he knew Schiller; or that he lied to congress. I have no way of knowing which of those three is true, but unless I’m missing something, one of them must be.

Miguel Correa

Retired General Correa served on Trump’s National Security Council as Senior Director for the Middle East and worked closely with the president’s senior adviser and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner. Correa has close relations with the ruling monarchy in the United Arab Emirates and led secret talks between Kushner and its government that resulted in a deal to sell F-35 stealth fighters to the UAE that was signed on Trump's last full day as president, but subsequently blocked by the Biden administration.

After Biden took office, Kusher made Correa an advisor on “geostrategy” at his private equity firm, Affinity Partners. In that role, Correa helped Affinity land hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the UAE and Qatar.

Lou Bremer

A former Navy SEAL, investment banker and longtime private equity specialist, Bremer until last year was a senior executive at Cerberus Capital Management, whose CEO Stephen Feinberg is a Trump megadonor. Trump nominated Bremer to a top special operations position at the Pentagon, but that was derailed when it emerged that four of the seven Saudis who assassinated Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 received paramilitary training at Tier 1, an Arkansas-headquartered private military firm that’s owned by Cerberus and where Bremer had a seat on the board.

The training began during the Obama administration, but continued after Trump’s inauguration. Before he withdrew his name from consideration for the Pentagon post, Bremer acknowledged Tier1 trained Saudi nationals, but denied knowledge that they included Khashoggi’s killers. I only saw one Off Leash post by Bremer, which was entirely innocuous but  shows he accepted Prince’s invitation to join the group chat.

Jack Posobiec

The prominent alt-right activist and conspiracy theorist, Posobiec was a special projects director for Citizens for Trump, which was formed to support his 2016 campaign. Posobiec gave the welcoming speech at the February CPAC, which caused a stir “Welcome to the end of democracy,” he said. “We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

Despite his crackpottery, Posobiec is influential in the outer fringes of MAGA World. “He’s the most brazen person in right-wing media,” Will Sommer, an editor at The Hill, said of Posobiec in 2017. “To make stuff up, relentlessly...There’s no one at that level.”

Prince and Posobiec were headliners at the New York Young Republican Club’s 107th annual gala in 2019. Two years later, the pair were interviewed by Bannon for “A War Room Special.” I didn’t see any posts to the group chat by Posobiec, so it’s possible he didn’t see it, or opted not to join.

Vish Burra

A leader of the New York Young Republican Club, a once-staid organization now controlled by Trump diehards, Burra was Congressman George Santos’ director of operations during the latter’s short, checkered congressional career. During an interview with House Ethics Committee staff, Derek Myers, a legislative assistant with Santos, said he paid Burra more than $1,000 when he was trying to get a job on the congressman’s staff.  

Burra once worked as a producer of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and as “Special Operations Coordinator” for Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who hired him in 2021 to run damage control after he was reported to be under federal investigation for having sex with an underage girl, an allegation that has never been proven. Along with that duo and Rudy Giuliani, Burra facilitated the journey of Hunter Biden’s laptop “from a laptop repair shop in Delaware to…the American people,” as Gaetz put it in a press release when he interviewed him in 2022 for Firebrand, the congressman’s podcast.

In 2019, Prince was a headliner at the New York Young Republican Club’s 107th annual gala at the Yale Club. A photo taken at the event shows Prince with an arm on Burra’s shoulder. 

Photo from Twitter.

Burra’s sole post to the group chat, at least what I saw, was a Christmas greeting to the Off Leash crew from Staten Island.

Marc Randazza

Randazza is a lawyer whose clients have included Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, and Alex Jones of Infowars, where he has provided occasional legal commentary. After he was retained on a pro bono basis by the Satanic Temple, which was founded to “fight a perceived intrusion of Christian values on American politics,” the Los Angeles chapter seceded, saying Randazza was a “Twitter troll and an agent of the alt-right.”

Last October, Prince appeared on an edition of War Room with Jones. I couldn’t find any evident connection between Prince and Randazza in the public record, but sources who know both men told me they knew each other, though they didn’t know if their relationship was purely social or included business matters.

Mark Corallo  

A former PR adviser for Blackwater and Prince, Corallo is a longtime GOP operative who was the spokesman for Trump's private legal team during the Russiagate investigation. He previously headed the Republican National Committee’s opposition research unit and during President George W. Bush’s administration, Corallo was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s spokesman and temporarily assigned to work for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

Frank Gaffney

Well known for his right-wing crackpottery and Islamophobia, Gaffney was one of the leading cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq War. He had close ties to the Trump administration and is friendly with fellow crank and grifter John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security advisor between 2018 and 2019. 

Gaffney is the founder, former president, and current executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy think tank, which has never seen a US military operation, bombing campaign, or overseas assassination it didn’t find alluring. I haven’t seen any posts by Gaffney to the group chat.

Paul Slough

One of a number of former Blackwater executives and employees in Off Leash, Slough was sentenced to prison for his role in the murders of 17 Iraqi civilians at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in 2007.  In December of 2020, as he was seeking to remain in office by hook or crook, Trump pardoned Slough and three other Blackwater employees involved in the massacre. Slough has posted to Off Leash at least a few times, but I haven’t seen anything he wrote that was particularly notable.

Coming next week: More names of Off Leash members, with a focus on its overseas contingent, plus excerpts from the group chat, including discussions between four participants – three weapons brokers and the fourth Seldowitz’s former employer Moti Kahana, who said he could serve as an intermediary with the Israeli military – to supply Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with arms for its operations in Gaza. One of those deals appears to be flatly illegal.