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Erik Prince
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons16

Erik Prince

American businessman and founder of Blackwater USA (born 1969)

Erik Dean Prince (born June 6, 1969) is an American businessman, who is the founder of private military contractor Blackwater. He was Blackwater's CEO until 2009 and its chairman until its sale to a group of investors in 2010.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Erik Prince (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Jun 6, 1969.1

About

Prince founded the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group in 2012 and was chairman of the Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group until 2021. Prince is the son of engineer and businessman Edgar Prince, and the brother of former U.S. secretary of education Betsy DeVos.

From Wikipedia’s article on Erik Prince, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedUnited States Naval Academy3
  • Date not recordedHillsdale College3
  • Date not recordedHolland Christian Schools3
  • Date not recordedHolland Christian High School3

Prince was born on June 6, 1969, in Holland, Michigan, the son of Edgar D. Prince and his wife, Elsa (née Zwiep), and the youngest of four children. He graduated from Holland Christian High School. Prince and his father toured the world together, visiting the Dachau concentration camp, divided Berlin, and the battlefields of Normandy. According to his mother, these trips "made a big impression" on the young Prince.

Prince was accepted into the United States Naval Academy and attended for three semesters before leaving, explaining that he loved the Navy but disliked the academy. He went on to receive his B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College in 1992. During his time at Hillsdale, he served as a volunteer firefighter and as a cold-water diver for the Hillsdale County Sheriff's Department. Prince eventually became an emergency medical technician.

In 1990, Prince secured an internship in the White House under George H. W. Bush, but soon left to intern for California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, President Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter. Rohrabacher described Prince as "a bright, driven young man." At the age of 21, Prince volunteered to search for a mass grave in Nicaragua, to expose killings that had taken place under President Daniel Ortega and later said that he had found the mass grave.

After college, Prince was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy via Officer Candidate School in 1992. Prince then received orders to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S) at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. After six months of training, Prince graduated with BUD/S class 188 in 1993. Following SEAL Tactical Training (STT) and completion of six month probationary period, he received the 1130 designator as a Naval Special Warfare Officer, entitled to wear the Special Warfare insignia. He deployed with SEAL Team 8 to Haiti, the Middle East, and the Balkans. He credits the SEALs for being an outlet for his entrepreneurial spirit. In his autobiography he states that during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, he realized that there was a need for private training facilities for special operations. Following his father's death in 1995, Prince ended his U.S. Navy service prematurely. A year later, Prince helped facilitate the sale of his father's auto parts company to Johnson Controls for US$1.35 billion.

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International Security Defense College

In May 2017, FSG acquired a 25% stake in the International Security Defense College in Beijing, a private training institution offering courses in counterterrorism, high-risk operations, and overseas security for military, law enforcement, and private personnel. FSG subsequently oversaw training programs for overseas security specialists.

From Wikipedia’s article on Erik Prince (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: entrepreneur, aircraft pilot, financier, businessperson, military officer.9

Personal life

  • BornJun 6, 1969, Holland10
  • CitizenshipUnited States11
  • ResidenceMiddleburg, Abu Dhabi12

Prince lives in both Middleburg, Virginia, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He converted to Catholicism in 1992 and describes himself as a practicing member of the church.

Family

Prince is the younger brother of former United States Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the brother-in-law of former Alticor (Amway) president Dick DeVos.

Prince's first wife, Joan Nicole, died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 36. She introduced Prince to Catholicism. They had four children. He later wrote that he had an affair with Joanna Ruth Houck, his children's nanny, while his wife was dying. Prince and Houck married in 2004. He is now married to Stacy DeLuke, a former Blackwater spokesperson.

Prince has twelve children. He had four children with each wife.

From Wikipedia’s article on Erik Prince (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Politics

Ties to Trump campaigns

The New York Times reported in May 2018 that Prince arranged an August 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, attended by himself, Donald Trump Jr., George Nader, and Joel Zamel, during which Nader reportedly told Trump Jr. the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were eager to help his father win the election, and Zamel pitched a social media manipulation campaign from his Israeli company Psy-Group. Prince had stated in his November 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that he had no formal communications or contact, nor any unofficial role, with the Trump campaign. Asked about this contradiction in March 2019, Prince replied, "I don't know if [the Committee] got the transcript wrong" and "not all the discussion that day was transcribed, and that's a fact." Prince acknowledged for the first time in March 2019 that he had attended the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, asserting he was there to "talk about Iran policy".

Special Counsel investigators have examined a meeting around January 11, 2017, in the Seychelles that was convened by the UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (known as "MBZ"), which Prince attended. Also present at that meeting were Nader and Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the state-owned Russian Direct Investment Fund, who is close to Vladimir Putin. UAE officials reportedly believed that Prince was representing the Trump transition and Dmitriev was representing Putin. The Washington Post had reported on April 3, 2017, that American, European and Arab officials said the Seychelles meeting was "part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump." Prince denied in his November 2017 House Intelligence Committee testimony that he had represented the Trump transition or that the meeting involved any back-channel. The Washington Post reported on March 7, 2018, that the Special Counsel had gathered evidence that contradicts Prince, and ABC News reported on April 6, 2018, that Nader had met with Prince at a Manhattan hotel days before the Seychelles meeting and later provided him with biographical information about Dmitriev.

The Mueller report later found that Nader had represented Prince to Dmitriev as "designated by Steve [Bannon] to meet you! I know him and he is very very well connected and trusted by the New Team", while Prince "acknowledged that it was fair for Nader to think that Prince would pass information on to the Transition Team", although Bannon told investigators that Prince had not informed him of the Dmitriev meeting in advance. Prince testified to the House Intelligence Committee that "I didn't fly there to meet any Russian guy", although the Mueller report found that he and Nader made significant preparations to meet Dmitriev. Although Prince characterized a second meeting between him and Dmitriev in a hotel bar as a chance encounter of no consequence, the meeting was actually pre-arranged after Prince had learned from calls back home that Russia had moved an aircraft carrier off Libya and he wanted to convey that the United States would not accept any Russian involvement in Libya.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff announced on April 30, 2019, that he was sending a criminal referral to the Justice Department alleging Prince had provided false testimony to the committee. United States Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd confirmed on February 4, 2020, that the Department of Justice was opening an investigation into Prince.

On December 30, 2019, it was reported that Prince had traveled to Venezuela to meet with a top aide of Nicolas Maduro. Prince has been referred to the United States Treasury Department for possible violations of sanctions against the Maduro government.

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Political infiltration operations

The New York Times reported in March 2020 that Prince recruited former intelligence agents to infiltrate "Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda." Prince's efforts were reportedly conducted to assist Project Veritas, a widely discredited conservative organization that was described as disseminating "coordinated disinformation" due to its repeated use of deceptively edited videos in attempts to discredit Democrats, the media, and liberal groups. Until mid-2018, Richard Seddon, a former British spy, headed the field operations for the plots and trained operatives in Wyoming at the Prince ranch. Prince also reportedly arranged for Project Veritas employees to receive intelligence training, which ended when the trainer quit because the group "wasn't capable of learning". Prince continued to support Project Veritas after the organization's failure to disclose to state regulators the criminal conviction of its founder, James O'Keefe, resulted in the revocation of their charitable organization status in multiple states, and caused other donors to withdraw their financial support.

In May 2021, The New York Times reported that Project Veritas, with the assistance of a former British spy and Erik Prince, secretly surveilled government employees during the Trump administration with the goal of discrediting perceived critics of former President Trump. Tactics included arranging dates for FBI employees with the intent to record them. The operation failed to record a single official disparaging Trump despite extensive expenditures including rental of an expensive Georgetown home.

Political views

Prince describes himself as a libertarian. Prince said, "I'm a very free market guy. I'm not a huge believer that government provides a whole lot of solutions. Some think that government can solve society's problems. I tend to think private charities and private organizations are better solutions."

Prince credits his time as a White House intern with some of his political views. He said that "having that White House internship responsibility and badges, I walked around some of these other cavernous federal agencies, and you want to talk about depressing? Walk through HHS or HUD or Commerce, you name it. Leviathan realized." Speaking of his internship, Prince said, "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act." Disenchanted, Prince became a backer of presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

In a 2024 episode of his podcast Prince said, "If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it's time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we're going to govern those countries (…) 'cause enough is enough, we're done being invaded. (…) You can say that about pretty much all of Africa, they're incapable of governing themselves."

Contributions to political and charitable causes

Between 1998 and 2007, Prince donated more than $200,000 to Republican and third-party causes. In 2006, Prince contributed money to the Green Party of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, as part of a failed effort to help Republican Rick Santorum defeat Democrat Bob Casey. He has donated to the Family Research Council, a beneficiary of the Prince and DeVos families since the 1980s,

In 2016 Prince contributed $250,000 to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and $100,000 to Make America Number 1, a Trump-aligned super PAC helmed by Rebekah Mercer.

Other Republican politicians to whom Prince has contributed include Ron Paul, Walter Jones, Joe Miller, Todd Tiarht, Mike Pence, Dana Rohrabacher, Oliver North, Pat Buchanan, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, Duncan L. Hunter, Ted Poe, Jon Kyl, Pete Hoekstra, and Mitt Romney.

Prince is a director of the Prince Foundation, an organization his parents founded in 1979 and which, as of 2025 is no longer seeking donations and has been sunset. In the 1990s Prince founded the Freiheit ("Liberty") Foundation, a nonprofit charity that funded a number of conservative causes. Publicly available tax records indicate the foundation has been largely inactive since 2008 after claiming a $1.8 million loss in 2007 (more than 50 percent of the foundation's assets) related to its investment in Seligman New Technologies Fund, whose manager was accused of engaging in illegal market timing activity.

Prince has frequently donated to conservative Christian organizations, including the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and the Prison Fellowship, and conservative political groups such as the Council for National Policy, of which his father was vice president at the time of his death. After the Nisour Square massacre in which Blackwater employees opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad, killing seventeen Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding twenty more, Prince supported a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan and built mosques at Blackwater bases.

From Wikipedia’s article on Erik Prince (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sources

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