“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this.
Let the games begin! House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa that he will make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice against Erik Prince for perjury. At issue is Prince’s testimony to his committee that a meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian financier was unplanned, while Prince’s testimony to special-counsel investigators suggest it was planned:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that his panel would make a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding potential false testimony by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the private military contractor Blackwater and an ally of President Trump.
“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this,” Schiff said during a Washington Post Live event.…
“We know from the Mueller report that was not a chance meeting,” Schiff told Post reporter Robert Costa during an interview at the event. “We know there were communications after he returned.”
“In very materials ways I think the evidence strongly suggests that he willingly mislead our committee and the Justice Department needs to consider whether there’s a prosecutable case,” Schiff added.
The collapse of the Russia-collusion hypothesis doesn’t necessarily mean the end of legal liability for some of the peripheral players in the conspiracy theories. Now that House Democrats have read Robert Mueller’s report, they have the opportunity to see where witness testimony contradicts that give to committees paralleling the special counsel investigation. Based on the report, Prince might end up being low-hanging fruit, at least theoretically. The Seychelles meeting not only doesn’t appear unplanned but looks carefully coordinated for Prince — planned specifically for Prince by UAE adviser George Nader:
Dmitriev undertook efforts to meet members of the incoming Trump Administration in the months after the election. Dmitriev asked a close business associate who worked for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) royal court, George Nader, to introduce him to Trump transition officials, and Nader eventually arranged a meeting in the Seychelles between Dmitriev and Erik Prince, a Trump Campaign supporter and an associate of Steve Bannon.
