Erik Prince is the billionaire mercenary who behind the private military contracting empire of Blackwater and their many war crimes. He's also the brother of US education secretary Betsy Devos (who in turn is married to the guy who pioneered pyramid schemes) and has served as a kind of "shadow advisor" to Trump, including an effort to privatize the entire war in Afghanistan and an alleged secret trip to the Seychelles to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He's basically Destro from GI JOE, but in real life, and somehow more evil (and without the shiny head).

The Intercept had previously reported that the Trump Administration had considered using Prince's black-ops services to counter the made-up threat of the "Deep State." Now the New York Times has confirmed that this happened, in a way that's both shadier than I would've expected and somehow still not all that surprising:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbuF_QwRP-E

Undercover is a World War II training film from the OSS, precursor to the CIA, would be enough to dissuade most people from a career in espionage. They enact numerous examples of tiny slip-ups that ended up blowing the covers of various spies and secret agents. Read the rest

During today's briefings with the Director of National Intelligence, and the head of the National Security Agency, Senate Democrats Mark Warner and Kamala Harris started to wear a little thin on the non-answers. Republican McCain got in a zinger too.

Via NPR:

Warner, along with several other senators, kept pressing and ultimately expressed frustration with the intelligence chiefs.

There are "reports, that nobody has laid to rest here, that the president of the United States has intervened directly in an ongoing FBI investigation and we've got no answers from any of you," Warner said.

The hearing was often contentious, particularly when Democratic senators questioned the intelligence officials.

Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, intervened at one point during a sharp exchange between California Democrat Kamala Harris and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

"The chair is going to exercise its right to allow the witnesses to answer the question, and committee is on notice to provide witnesses the courtesy, which has not been extended all the way across," Burr said.

Republican John McCain of Arizona took a softer approach, drawing chuckles when he asked Coats, "Do you want to tell us any more about the Russian involvement in our election that we don't already know from reading The Washington Post?"

Coats did not offer any details, but said, "Just because it's in The Washington Post doesn't mean it's declassified."

The Senate Intelligence Committee is holding two days of closely watched hearings that might — or might not — shed new light on the state of the Russia investigation.