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The Justice Department is in the late stages of deciding whether to charge businessman and Trump ally Erik Prince in an investigation into whether he lied to Congress in its Russia probe and violated U.S. export laws in his business dealings overseas, according to people familiar with the matter.
The investigation gathered steam in recent months with the cooperation of several witnesses, the people said. Potential charges against Prince, the founder of the defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater, include making false statements to Congress and violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the people said.
Associated Press Erik Prince, a Republican donor and founder of the security firm formerly called Blackwater (later known as Xe Services and today as Academi), arrives for a closed-door meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee in 2017. Prince is the brother of the Trump administration’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.
Investigators have been examining Prince’s 2017 testimony to Congress about his meeting with an adviser to Russia President Vladimir Putin, the people said. The episode was the subject of a criminal referral in April 2019 by the House Intelligence Committee, after special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report appeared to contradict Prince’s testimony and described a different motivation for the trip than Prince had described to Congress.
The Justice Department told the committee in a Feb. 4 letter it would “refer” the request for an investigation “to the proper investigative agency” — though it was already looking at the matter, the people said.
An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.
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