From The Financial Times:
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater private security group and a close campaign adviser to Donald Trump, met a Russian financier with direct ties to Vladimir Putin's family in the weeks leading up to Mr Trump's inauguration, according to multiple people briefed on the talks.
Although Mr Prince's meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles, which is being examined by special counsel Robert Mueller, has been previously disclosed, Mr Dmitriev's ties to the Putin clan have not been widely known. According to six people close to Mr Dmitriev, his wife is close friends with Mr Putin’s younger daughter.
The close links to Mr Putin's family are likely to raise new questions about whether Mr Prince was seeking a back-door communications route to the Kremlin on behalf of Mr Trump following earlier press reports that Mr Mueller was pursuing this line of inquiry.
Mr Dmitriev’s wife Natalia Popova was in the same year at Moscow State University as Yekaterina Tikhonova, Mr Putin’s younger daughter, and is the deputy director of her technology foundation, Innopraktika.
Ms Popova’s close friendship with Ms Tikhonova helped secure Mr Dmitriev’s job running the Kremlin’s $10bn Russia Direct investment Fund and has made him a powerful figure in the Kremlin, according to three people who work with Mr Dmitriev, a state banker, a fellow private equity executive and a person who knows him socially.
www.ft.com/…
What a wacky coincidence that Erik Prince just happened to be a Trump transition representative vacationing there, who, by chance, got introduced to him! I’m kidding, of course — George Nader, if I’m not mistaken, is cooperating with Mueller and has told him that he was instructed to set up this meeting in order to establish a secret Trump-Kremlin back channel.
Looks like it might be Erik Prince’s time in the barrel.