Fresh Developments in the Ongoing FBI Investigation of Erik Prince

Plus: What’s up with the formerly secret WhatsApp group chat Prince created last year, including the names of some newly identified members.

Tucker Carlson, a previously identified participant of Erik Prince’s WhatsApp group chat, and Jennifer Grossman,a newly confirmed member, fellow fascist admirer, and CEO of the Atlas Society, the libertarian outfit that has long promoted Argentina’s freak show leader Javier Milei. Grossman posted the photo on her Instagram page.

Last August, I revealed in Washington Babylon that the FBI was investigating Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and political and financial supporter of Donald Trump, for seeking to arm a rebel militia leader in Libya five years ago in violation of an international embargo, money laundering related to the operation, and maintaining improper contacts with foreign military services agencies in China and Russia. The story was subsequently confirmed by Matthew Cole, who reported that a federal grand jury had been convened in Washington as part of the investigation.

Prince has previously been accused of criminal wrongdoing in the US and overseas but he’s always denied the charges and never been convicted of a crime. There’s no way to know if this time will prove different, but the feds are said to be aggressively pursuing the case.

The arms deal was allegedly part of “Project Opus,” which was financed by the governments of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and designed to support troops commanded by a former military officer named Khalifa Hifter, who’d been a CIA asset when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya. Hifter was attempting to overthrow the country’s government and the goal of Project Opus was to supply his forces with a list of weapons that included assault helicopters, intelligence and reconnaissance aircraft, and drones,” according to a 2021 United Nations report. “At the very least,” said the report, Prince “assisted in the evasion of…the arms embargo in Libya.”

The grand jury recently expressed interest in hearing testimony from British Colonel Alex Macintosh, a former military adviser to Jordan’s King Abdullah, a well-informed source told me. McIntosh blocked a Project Opus-linked weapons deal from Jordan, where the materiel had been sent as an intermediary stop en route to Hifter in Libya.

Of particular interest to the panel is information McIntosh can share about Christiaan Durrant, an Australian fighter pilot who has reportedly worked alongside Prince on a number of overseas adventures, including the Libyan deal. Durrant was in Jordan when the alleged arms shipment was in progress and McIntosh “knocked on his door” when he was working to shut down the operation, according to the source.

Oh, what a tangled web was weaved by Mark Green when he decided to deceive his wife, who charged last month that soon after the Tennessee lawmaker and pillar of congressional morality hit it off with a young lady three years younger than his 35-year-old marriage, he began throwing alcohol-imbibing parties with other elected officials on the fast track to divorce. Even more shockingly, Green hosted the parties in the basement of the home he shared with his wife while telling her the guests were coming over for bible story. Photo: Green’s official House portrait.

I’ve also got news about what’s been up with Off Leash, Prince’s formerly secret WhatsApp group chat, which I originally revealed in The New Republic five months ago and have reported on extensively here since then, most recently on June 18. Prince invited about 650 of his right-wing political and business associates to join the group, including a significant number of full-fledged fascists, racists, and crackpots, when he created it in late 2023. 

About three-quarters of the invitees were from the US, among them four current and former members of congress. That quartet includes Representative Mark Green of Tennessee, who as I reported in Washington Babylon last week has recently experienced a bit of turmoil on the domestic front. 

Last month, his wife, Camilla Green, sent a text message to an undisclosed number of the couple’s mutual friends and acquaintances as well as a select group of his Republican congressional colleagues to inform them that Green had dumped her for a 32-year-old woman, making her three years younger than their marriage. The congressman, a self-professed champion of family values, had developed friendships with other adulterous lawmakers and their female companions, Camilla Green added in the e-communication she blasted out to the far corners of Tennessee and the nation’s capital, and regularly invited them to attend louche parties “in the basement of our home” when she thought he was downstairs hosting a Bible study group with his guests.

Former Virginia Representative Tom Garrett, who resigned his House seat in 2018 after it was alleged he and his wife used his congressional staff to run errands, chauffeur their children, and clean up after their dog, can’t seem to catch a break as of late either. Garrett, who denied those charges and said he’d stepped down from congress because he was an alcoholic, has been dropping hints in the group chat that he’s looking for work and “trying to find out if anyone might have a job for him,” a source who remains active in the group told me. 

The Israeli contingent in Off Leash was the second largest after the US delegation among the original invitees with 32 members, 12 more than the United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom which were tied in second place among the roughly three dozen foreign countries represented in the group chat.  When I wrote the story for The New Republic, Off Leash’s total membership stood at a little north of 400. It’s fallen slightly to 377 since then, but the source said the number of people actively participating has declined more significantly. 

I’ve previously confirmed the identities of several hundred of the people Prince invited to join Off Leash and am rolling out their names when publishing new installments in the ongoing series I’m writing about the group chat. I’ve recently identified another score or so, including China-bashing former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom, who recently charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams “ghosted him on Turkey’s orders,” in the words of this NewsNation story. 

Mayor Eric Adams gives a thumbs up after his September 28 arraignment, where he was charged with taking bribes from Turkish government agents. It’s important to remember that Adams may be entirely innocent, just as the moon may be entirely made of cheese. Photo posted at Wikimedia Commons by SWinxy, a professional photographer based in New York who can be contacted here.

“Me and Eric had a conversation about organizing free basketball camps for kids in New York,” recounted Kanter Freedom, who’s also a strong critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whereas Mayor Adams was indicted last week for taking bribes from Erdogan’s government. “I remember he got so excited. He gave me his phone number and said, ‘As soon as you come back, let me know’.” But after the NBA veteran tried to reach out to Adams following his return from his then-impending trip to Greece following their 2022 discussion, the mayor of Gotham City failed to respond when he reached out in hopes of moving forward with the free camp project. 

Other freshly confirmed Off Leash invitees include:

• Sean Bannon, the nephew of former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, who’s set to be released from prison later this month after completing a four-month stretch for defying a subpoena from the now-defunct House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol. Maureen Bannon, the jailbird’s devoted daughter, was also a member of Off Leash and was her father’s designated representative according to a source who spoke to me several months ago.

• Jennifer Grossman, the CEO of the Atlas Society, the libertarian, fascist-boosting outfit that seeks to “engage young people with the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways” – good luck with that – and has long promoted Argentina’s freak show leader Javier Milei. Prior to joining The Atlas Society, Grossman was a Senior Vice President with Dole Food Company and a speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush, according to her Atlas Society bio. 

• Jon Harrison, who Trump appointed to the United States Arctic Research Commission, which advises the president and congress on Arctic research. Harrison previously held a position on the Arctic Subcommittee of the National Petroleum Council.

• Michael Siefert, the founder and CEO of PublicSq, which is headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. Siefert, who has called Trump “a living legend,” is “a prominent figure in media,” or at least that’s what one of his online bios claims. It says he’s appeared on “influential shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tim Pool’s TimCast, Steve Bannon’s War Room, Fox News at Night...and many more.” 

• Jan Jekielek, a senior editor with The Epoch Times, who’s “interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera” and is “an award-winning documentary filmmaker” who produced “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” his corporate bio states.

I’ve already got a new story in the works about Prince that will drop the names of a few more members of the Off Leash crew. However, the story, which I’ll be publishing next week, God willing, will be attempting to answer a question that could create additional legal troubles for Prince: What the fuck is he up to in Venezuela?