The Second Trump Tower Meeting: Psy Group, Arab Princes, and America’s Most Infamous Mercenary
This article describes the events that led up to a meeting in Trump Tower during the 2016 election between Donald Trump Jr., the infamous mercenary billionaire Erik Prince, the CEO of the Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group, and a convicted pedophile representing the interests of two powerful Arab princes.
It is the second entry in the series “Convergence of Shadows: Israel, the Gulf States, and Erik Prince in the 2016 Election.” While it is not necessary to read previous entries, in this case it is highly recommended.
Part one covered the the connections between the Trump campaign, the Israeli political right, the the Israeli private intelligence industry.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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As chronicled in the first article of this series, a 2016 meeting between Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates and the conservative Israeli political consultant George Birnbaum led to the the Israeli private intelligence company Psy Group devising a multifacted plan to aid the Trump campaign.
Psy Group’s subsequent efforts to pitch the plan to individuals in the Trump campaign subsequently floundered. Psy Group’s CEO Joel Zamel persisted, however, and eventually gained access to the halls of Trump Tower.
The effort involved a convicted pedophile representing the interests of the most powerful Arab princes in the Middle East and America’s most controversial mercenary.
Joel Zamel Meets George Nader in St. Petersburg
Zamel’s most successful effort to gain access to the Trump campaign began with an unusual individual in an unlikely place: St. Petersburg, Russia.
While attending the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June of 2016, Zamel was introduced to a politically-connected Lebanese-American named George Nader.
Nader enjoyed close ties to Arab leaders in the Gulf, including the Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan (MBZ), and the powerful Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
Zamel’s introduction to Nader was facilitated by John Hannah, a former national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney who currently serves as the senior counselor to the pro-Israel nonprofit the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and as member of the advisory board to Zamel’s aforementioned company Wikistrat.
Hannah was also known to have worked with Nader during the former’s time in the George W. Bush administration.
In the 1990s, George Nader edited Middle East Insight, a Washington, DC-based magazine that served as a forum for Arab, Israeli and Iranian officials to express opinions directed towards an American audience.
In 1998, Nader became involved in an ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic exchange between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights.
Over the course of this experience, Nader traveled to Damascus on multiple occasions alongside Israel’s informal diplomatic representative Ronald Lauder, a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s.
By 2003, Nader was hired by the American private military contractor Blackwater to help generate business in Iraq, which had just undergone an American invasion that had toppled the government of Saddam Hussein and unleashed an insurgency.
Nader appears to have established high level contacts within the Iraqi government, which in turn provided him access to influential parties within Russia.
In 2012, he helped broker a $4.2 billion arms deal between Russia and Iraq by traveling to Moscow and informing the Russians that he represented the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki. Sources knowledgeable about the deal in Iraq found it suspicious as Maliki appeared to be using Nader to go around the official channels that normally negotiated such deals.
A month after the deal was signed, the Iraqi acting-Defense Minister pulled the plug on the deal citing possible corruption.
Also in 2012, Nader first attended the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, the same Davos-like conference where four years later he would meet with Joel Zamel.
It was also around this time that Nader moved to the United Arab Emirates and became an advisor and representative to its’ powerful de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, often referred in the West by his initials, MBZ.
According to The New York Times, Nader often traveled to Russia acting as a representative for MBZ and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Looming in the shadows behind his political activities was the fact that Nader was a convicted pedophile and consumer of child pornography. In 1985, he was indicted in the US on charges of importing obscene materials, including photos of nude boys “engaging in a variety of sexual acts.”
The charges were brought after a U.S. Customs inspector opened a package that was destined for Nader’s office and discovered the materials, which led to a search warrant being drawn up and further illegal pornographic materials being discovered.
Despite the government’s argument that the searches had been justified because Nader, “a suspected pedophile, was likely to seek to contact children,” the charges were thrown out on procedural grounds.
In 1991 a federal court in Virginia convicted Nader of transporting videos from Germany of “pre and post pubescent boys” engaging in sexually explicit acts and sentenced him to six months.
Prosecutors put the case under seal “due to the extremely sensitive nature of Mr. Nader’s work in the Middle East.”
In 2003, Nader served a year in prison in the Czech Republic after being convicted by a court in Prague of sexually abusing teen boys.
How Nader managed to continue finding himself in politically sensitive positions despite the fact that he was a convicted pedophile with a compromised past remains a mystery.
In June of 2016 Joel Zamel approached Nader for a meeting while both were attending the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.
A representative for Nader later told The New Yorker that Zamel told Nader he was trying to raise money for a social media campaign to support the candidacy of Donald Trump and thought that the Gulf Princes Nader represented might be interested in supporting the effort financially.
Zamel denied to both The New Yorker and the Senate Intelligence Committee that any such conversation took place, or that U.S. politics was discussed during the St. Petersburg meeting.
Zamel did recall that several days after they had met, Nader sent him a picture of himself standing with Vladimir Putin, which Zamel interpreted as a means to emphasize Nader’s high level of access.
In the period that followed their initial meeting Zamel and Nader began communicating with increased frequency, speaking multiple times a week or even on a daily basis.
Despite the mystery surrounding the content of Joel Zamel and George Nader’s conversation in St. Petersburg, Zamel would have been on firm footing had he assumed that Nader’s patrons MBZ and the ferociously ambitious Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), then serving as Saudi Arabia’s Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
According to a report in Middle East Eye by David Hearst, in late 2015 Nader convened a remarkable summit of Middle Eastern leaders on a yacht in the Red Sea. Among those present were MBZ, MBS, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa of Bahrain and King Abdullah of Jordan.
Nader used the Summit to propose that the combined leaders replace the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Arab League with a new, elite institution that consisted of their five countries plus Libya, which did not have a representative at the meeting.
The purpose of this bloc was to back the United States and Israel and through doing so further isolate and damage their chief regional rival, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
According to Hearst, it was at that meeting that the Arab leaders decided that a Trump presidency was their best hope of reversing President Obama’s efforts to engage Iran in diplomacy, in particular through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), colloquially known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Like Netanyahu, many Arab leaders, in particular MBZ and MBS, were opponents of Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
The arch-conservative monarchies in Gulf were horrified when Obama choose to side with the Arab Spring protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo over America’s traditional ally, the secular strongman Hosni Mubarak, and clandestinely worked to overthrow the subsequently elected Muslim Brother government of Mohammed Morsi and have it replaced with the military dictatorship led by al-Sisi.
Relations between the Obama administration further deteriorated when he opted against imposing his so-called “Red Line” after the Iranian backed government of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people during the Syrian Civil War.
Ultimately, it was Obama’s direct diplomatic overtures to Iran that most rankled Israel and the Gulf States and drew the traditional enemies closer together.
George Nader met with Joel Zamel of Psy Group on multiple occasions in New York, Washington, DC and several other locations.
In July of 2016, Nader informed Zamel that he was interested in setting up a meeting with either the Trump campaign or the Trump family.
To facilitate such a meeting, Zamel reached out to Erik Prince, a conservative activist and billionaire founder of the infamous military contracting and security firm Blackwater, who was himself attempting to establish ties to the Trump campaign.
The Aggrieved Warrior: Erik Prince’s Journey to Supporting the Trump Campaign
Erik Prince was the scion of a wealthy, conservative and devoutly religious family. His father, Edgar D. Prince, founded the auto parts supplier, the success of which made him one of the wealthiest men in Michigan.
Edgar Prince was also a religious and political donor and activist. In 1983 he co-founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer.
Bauer, a prominent evangelical and conservative activist, was a regular guest in the Prince household, as was James C. Dobson, the founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family.
After an injury forced him to leave the Naval Academy, Prince attended the private, conservative liberal arts Hillsdale College, where he developed into a devout adherent of the Austrian School of Economics, which celebrated the free market and generally opposed taxes and government regulation. It was here that Prince’s conservative views crystallized.
Around this time, Prince also became an intern at the George H.W. Bush White House. He found himself disillusioned by the experience, convinced that Bush was abandoning conservative principles.
Prince had a fateful, chance encounter at a DC bowling alley with a Republican member of the House of Representatives from California: Dana Rohrabacher.
Read my description of Dana Rohrabacher’s many trips and connections to Russia and his anti-Magitsky Act lobbying in Congress on behalf of the same Russians who arranged the infamous June 9th Trump Tower Meeting here.
After Prince explained that he was unhappy interning at the White House, Rohrabacher offered him an unpaid position in his office on Capitol Hill. Prince accepted, and quickly befriended another individual working in Rohrabacher’s office, the former Marine Paul Behrends.
It was the beginning of an enduring friendship that would last for years.
Rohrabacher sent Prince and Behrends on several Congressional fact finding trips abroad. Their first trip took them to Croatia and Slovenia just as the former Yugoslavia was sliding into civil war.
Prince and Behrends traveled to Nicaragua in the aftermath of a civil war where the United States had covertly funded the right-wing rebel group the Contras against the Marxist Sandinista government.
In what became known as the Iran Contra Affair, the funding of the Contras had been organized by elements of the Reagan administration in contravention of a prohibition by Congress, and was facilitated by the illegal sales of arms to Iran.
Behrends became so close to Prince that he influenced his decision on becoming a Catholic.
After his brief stint in Washington, Prince became a commissioned officer in the Navy and subsequently joined the Navy SEALS. He deployed with SEAL Team 8 and served in Haiti, the Middle East and the Balkans.
Upon the death of his father in 1995, Prince left the SEALS and two years later, with the help of several of his SEALS buddies, established Blackwater Worldwide, which was destined to become the world’s most infamous military contractor, otherwise known as mercenaries to its detractors.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Blackwater operated at the heart of the Global War on Terror.
In 2002, following the American invasion of Afghanistan, Blackwater was awarded a classified contract by the CIA to provide security for its station in Kabul and other facilities it operated across the country.
Blackwater was awarded the contract in April of 2002 through its relationship with A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, executive director at the CIA, the Agency’s third highest position.
Krongard, whose son was a Navy SEAL, had visited Blackwater’s training facility which had already worked with CIA personnel.
He later served as an unpaid advisor to Blackwater’s board until 2007.
Prince’s relationship with the CIA was partially facilitated by Paul Behrends, who had valuable contacts in Afghanistan that he shared.
After the September 11th attacks, George W. Bush signed orders authorizing the CIA to pursue a secret assassination program targeting members of al-Qaeda.
The template for Bush’s order was a memo authored by Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC), and called for a remarkable expansion of the CIA’s authority to utilize secret paramilitary death squads as well as armed predator drones to hunt down and kill al-Qaeda terrorists.
Working beneath Black at the CIA was Enrique “Ric” Prado, who oversaw the CTC’s “targeted assassination program.”
Unlike drone attacks, which could easily be traced back to the US, Prado’s program was meant for targets that needed to be taken out without any fingerprints linking the act back to the U.S. government.
The relationship between the CIA and Blackwater became ever more entwined. By 2004 Prince had become, according to sources who spoke to Vanity Fair, a fully fledged asset of the Agency.
That same year Cofer Black and Ric Prado joined Blackwater, and were subsequently joined by Rob Richer, the second highest ranking member of the CIA’s clandestine service.
As Vice President at Blackwater, Prado appears to have brought the assassination program that he had overseen while at the CIA with him, providing the Agency with plausible deniability.
In 2004, Blackwater began participating in some of the CIA’s most secretive raids not only in Afghanistan, but in Iraq as well.
Blackwater contractors also assembled and loaded hellfire missiles onto drones for targeted assassination missions.
Following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Blackwater was awarded many more US government contracts, including for providing security for State Department diplomats operating in the country.
It was through Blackwater’s work in Iraq that Prince became acquainted with George Nader, who helped Blackwater seek out contracts with the Iraqi government.
Blackwater quickly found itself at the heart of some of the most controversial episodes of the war.
On March 31st, four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed while driving through the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The contractors were dragged from their cars and the bodies were burned and desecrated before being hung from a bridge.
The incident received widespread media attention and directly precipitated the First Battle of Fallujah, which led to the deaths of 27 American servicemen and between 184–222 Iraqis.
It also led to a lawsuit between the families of the slain contractors and Blackwater that wasn’t settled until 2012.
The day after the ambush Prince turned again to his old friend and now lobbyist: Paul Behrends.
Since their stint working for Rohrabacher, Prince and Behrends had remained friends. They served alongside one another on the board of Christian Freedom International (CFI), an evangelical Christian organization founded and operated by former members of the Reagan administration, some of whom with links to the Iran Contra Affair.
Behrends, who had lobbied for Blackwater since 1998, was by 2004 working at the Alexander Strategy Group, whose close relationship with Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, as well as its role as a recipient of money from the GRU-linked management of the Russian oil company Naftasib, has been described in a previous article.
Within days of the ambush, Behrends was shuttling Prince around the halls of Congress, arranging for meetings with powerful congressional leaders and the heads of relevant committees in charge of awarding government contracts and establishing the rules of conduct for military contractors operating in war zones.
On September 16th, 2007, Blackwater employees were involved in a notorious incident that took place at the intersection of Nisour Square in Baghdad. The incident, which came to be known as the Nisour Square Massacre, infuriated the Iraqi public and government.
It ultimately led to five separate investigations and in 2014 four Blackwater contractors were found guilty in U.S. court, one of murder and the three of manslaughter and firearms charges.
The negative press following the massacre began to bite. Blackwater’s relationships with the CIA and State Department started to fray.
Shortly after Bush was succeeded by President Obama, Prince’s relationship with the U.S. Government took a turn for the worse.
On June 23rd, 2009, Obama’s newly installed head of the CIA Leon Panetta was informed by the CIA’s Counterrorism Center of the existence of the CIA paramilitary assassination program.
He further learned of Blackwater’s involvement in the program, which former Vice President Dick Cheney had told the CIA that they did not need to inform Congress about.
Panetta immediately cancelled the program. The next day, he revealed its existence in a special, closed door session of Congress.
The move infuriated Prince, who believed he had been betrayed and that Panetta had outed him as a CIA asset.
Nor was his deteriorating relationship with the CIA Prince’s only problem. The Department of Justice was investigating Blackwater on federal weapons trafficking violations. In 2008, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided Blackwater’s complex in Moyock, North Carolina.
Despite the fact that the government’s case mostly collapsed, with three Blackwater employees being exonerated and two pleading guilty to misdemeanors, it contributed to Prince’s sense of being under siege.
Judging from his increasingly bitter public statements, Prince began to believe that he was being intentionally targeted.
Prince eventually left the US and resettled in the United Arab Emirates. He wasted no time in reorienting his company towards a clientele that included foreign governments and private corporations.
Prince established himself as a close ally of Mohammad bin Zayed (MBZ), serving as a foreign policy and military advisor and convincing him to invest millions in a mercenary army that would act as a kind of Praetorian Guard for the Gulf monarchies.
By 2011, Prince started running into trouble again. His business in the UAE dried up after MBZ balked at the unwelcome media attention following a New York Times blockbuster report on his private army.
Prince then moved into private equity, establishing Frontier Resource Group (FRG), which invested in the extraction of African natural resources such as oil and minerals in countries like Guinea, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
After losing his income stream from the UAE, however, Prince began having cash flow problems.
Prince’s next move was to build business relationships in China.
In 2013, he began discussions with the wealthy Hong Kong entrepreneur Johnson Ko to purchase a controlling interest in another company he established called Frontier Services Group (FSG).
Prince eventually sold Ko a controlling interest in FSG and stayed on as chairman. FSG’s executive team consisted of a group of Americans, including a former Blackwater alum named Gregg Smith, and a group of Chinese executives from CITIC Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise formerly known as the China International Trust Investment Corp. CITIC held a 20% stake in FSG.
Prince entered the Chinese market at a time the country’s communist government was making a massive investment in its Belt and Road Initiative, a state-funded global infrastructure project.
FSG focused on protecting Chinese foreign ventures, as well as aviation and shipping primarily in Africa, where Chinese companies were scouring the continent for the natural resources. This search often led to dangerous conflict zones and FSG advertised itself as specializing in high risk evacuations.
Prince’s proximity to the Chinese government stirred discomfort in American intelligence circles.
While Prince publicly presented himself as out of the mercenary game, privately he pursued a series of secret and controversial projects offering private military contractors to a variety of unsavory foreign actors.
As early as 2013, Prince developed plans to build a small army in Libya. Code named “Operation Lima,” Prince proposed to put together an armed ground force to help stabilize eastern Libya.
Though the proposal fell through, Prince returned to Libya in 2015 and pitched the plan again, this time promising that the armed force of private contractors could be used to stem the flow of refugees and economic migrants using Libya as a launch pad to enter the European Union.
By May of 2015, Prince was pitching Operation Lima to various individuals and government authorities in Germany and Italy. He proposed to pay for the project using money from the Libyan Investment Authority which had been frozen by European Banks.
When the Europeans failed to support the plan and the banks refused to unfreeze the Libyan cash, Prince sought alternatives.
According to The Intercept, Prince was being investigated by the US Government for weapons sales in Africa that possibly violated American laws. Investigators surveilled Prince and discovered that, after being rebuffed by the Europeans, he had discussed the possibility of opening up a bank account in China for his Libyan associates.
Prince traveled to Macau and attempted to open a bank account at a branch of European bank on the Chinese island but was denied after individuals at the bank’s European headquarters reviewed the request.
Prince then traveled to Beijing, where he reportedly met with agents of the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence agency.
By January of 2016, Prince returned to Macau where he opened up an account with the Bank of China that U.S. intelligence officials believed could have been intended to use as means to facilitate the laundering of Libyan money to fund Operation Lima.
By the beginning of 2016, Prince was reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice and other federal agencies not only for offering potentially illegal military services and arms sales to Libya and other African countries, but also for setting up a Chinese bank account, with the possible assistance of Chinese intelligence, for the purpose of laundering money to fund his Libyan operations.
To add to his problems, Prince was also facing a potential revolt from the American executives working at Frontier Services Group.
At a tense, two day board meeting held in Hong Kong in March of 2016, FSG’s American executives expressed their worries that the company risked running afoul of U.S. laws regulating the sale of weapons to foreign governments.
Gregg Miller, FSG’s Chief Executive, had learned that in 2015 Prince had ordered that two of the companies crop duster aircraft, which were supposed to be used for scouting purposes, be modified so they could be outfitted with either guns, rockets or hellfire missiles.
After learning that the planes were intended to be used by the Government of Azerbaijan in a campaign against ethnic Armenians, Miller came to worry that such an action could be in violation of U.S International Arms Trafficking Regulations (ITAR).
Prince’s plans to build weaponized crop dusters dated back to 2013. A month after becoming FSG’s chairman, Prince purchased two Thrush 510G crop dusters, which he told his colleagues would be used for non-lethal reconnaissance missions.
Prince informed executives at FSG that the plans would be used by the government of Mali for surveillance purposes in their battle against a local al-Qaeda militant group.
He then went ahead and hired an Austrian company called Airborne Technologies to install surveillance equipment on the crop dusters.
Unbeknownst to FSG’s executives, Prince secretly owned 25% of Airborne Technologies.
His purchase of a portion of the company had been brokered by an Israeli named Dorian Barak, who served as Prince’s personal attorney and represented his interests on Airborne’s board.
The planes were flown to Vienna, where Prince arranged for them to be modified into paramilitary aircraft.
The project was overseen by a former Australian special forces pilot named Christiaan “Serge” Durrant, whom Prince had placed in charge of FSG’s “specialty aviation division.”
In order to get around Austria’s strict defense export regulations, Prince and associates at Airborne Technologies established a Bulgarian front company called LASA (an acronym for “Light Armed Surveillance Aircraft”) Engineering Ltd. Bulgaria was chosen due to its lax export laws.
In May of 2014, Prince traveled to Bulgaria and toured the Arsenal factory in Kazanlak, Bulgaria’s largest arms manufacturer. He was interested in Arsenal’s line of “aerial weaponry.”
A month later, an FSG contractor named Shawn Matthews traveled to Bulgaria and met with Peter Mirchev, a Bulgarian arms dealer who had supplied weapons to Viktor Bout, a Russian weapons dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.”
According to Nicholas Schmidle of The New Yorker, Mirchev had told him that Bout worked for Russian military intelligence, the GRU.
Mirchev is also believed to have been a major Bulgarian node in Semyon Mogilevich’s extensive international illegal arms sales network.
It is not known what Matthews and Mirchev discussed.
While most of the weaponized modifications were actually done to the planes in Austria, the crop dusters were then brought over to Bulgaria for a simple installation process.
One of the planes was outfitted with Russian-made mounted machine guns and engineered to be able to utilize both Russian and NATO designed munitions.
While the first plane was meant to be used in a contract with the President of South Sudan that ultimately fell apart, Prince and Airborne Technologies moved forward with arming the second plane.
Two Airborne employees visited weapons manufacturers in Bulgaria and Ukraine to look into various kinds of weapons systems that could be added to the second modified aircraft.
Prince offered use of the planes to the government of Azerbaijan, which was building up its military in anticipation for a conflict with Armenia over the disputed territory Nagorno-Karabakh.
According to The Intercept, Prince was connected to the Azerbaijani’s through a “former Russian weapons supplier,” whose identity remains unknown.
Suspicious of Prince’s tendency to have FSG sign contracts with companies in which he held secret stakes, and worried that they may be in violation of US ITAR laws, FSG executives hired the firm King & Spalding to investigate what Prince had been up to.
The King & Spalding investigation uncovered that Prince had been using his position at FSG to privately court the former Soviet county of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense, proposing to offer security services under the codename “Project Zulu,” which included the use of the secretly weaponized aircraft. King & Spalding further determined that the services Prince was offering Azerbaijan were not in the interests of FSG.
The internal scrutiny of the deal at FSG led to it falling apart.
In February of 2016, representatives at FSG reportedly traveled to Washington where they met with officials at the Department of Justice, including the head of DOJ’s National Security Division and senior prosecutor with an expertise in export control in the DOJ’s counterespionage section.
At the meeting the FSB executives disclosed evidence related to the modified crop dusters as well Prince’s activities in China and Azerbaijan.
At the FSG board meeting held the next month in March, Prince was confronted by the company’s American executives. Johnson Ko and the company’s Chinese executives leapt to Prince’s defense. The disagreement over Prince ultimately led to a raft of resignations among FSG American executives, fearing their work for the company conflicted with US interests.
It was in this context, being surveilled by American intelligence and facing investigations from the Department of Justice, Prince began to support the candidacy of Donald Trump.
Having a friend in the White House who would be selecting the next Attorney General and the heads of the various American intelligence agencies would have been very much in Erik Prince’s interest.
It was also in this time period that Prince became acquainted with Psy Group owner Joel Zamel.
Zamel claims that he was introduced to Prince by Cofer Black, the former number three at CIA turned Blackwater executive and Chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions.
Prince, Zamel and Nader Meet Don Jr: The Second Trump Tower Meeting
Prince’s interactions with Zamel led to Psy Group developing a project designed to improve Prince’s online reputation that was alternately referred to as “Black Jack” or “Jack Black.” Despite meeting several times to discuss the project, Zamel claims that Psy Group never went ahead with the project.
In July of 2016, Zamel reached out to Prince about setting up a meeting for himself and George Nader, whom Prince had known since Iraq, with the Trump team.
In the context of these discussions, Psy Group CEO Royi Burstein sent Zamel an email on August 1st with a two-page document attached titled “Project Rome’’ that described the suite of services Psy Group could offer the Trump campaign related to the 2016 election.
While the proposal had the same name as the offer Psy Group had made several months earlier to George Birnbaum, it contained subtle differences.
The services offered included “generat[ing] influence through various online and offline platforms, assets and techniques,” as well as setting up and promoting “tailored third-party messaging directed toward optimizing impact and acceptance within the target audience(s).”
The proposal further promised to “focus on select voter groups/segments that may not be susceptible to campaign messaging originating from the candidate or organizations known to be affiliated with the candidate.”
Minority voters, suburban women and undecided voters were all specifically mentioned as targets.
Two days later, on August 3rd, Zamel and Nader were together at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan when at roughly 4pm they received a call from Erik Prince instructing them to head over to Trump Tower.
Upon their arrival, Prince, Zamel and Nader were shuttled into Donald Trump Jr.’s office.
Prince reportedly took charge and led the meeting. According to The New York Times, he opened by explaining to the candidate’s son, “we are working hard for your father.”
Prince and Don Jr. started out by discussing matters related to the campaign.
Nader explained to Don Jr. that the Saudi and Emirate Crown Princes MBS and MBZ, who he repeatedly referred to as “my friends,” wanted his father to win the election.
To emphasize his point, Nader showed Don Jr. photos of himself in friendly poses with MBS and MBZ.
He also discussed matters related to Middle East politics, mentioning issues such as the Islamic State and the risks posed by Iran, and explaining how it was the belief of the Gulf Princes that Trump could fill a vacuum that had been left by President Obama in the region.
About 25 minutes into the meeting, Trump campaign senior policy advisor Stephen Miller joined the discussion.
Towards the end of the meeting, Joel Zamel described the work he did through his private intelligence firms Psy Group and Wikistrat. The exact nature of his description, and whether it included discussing “Project Rome” or any of the other pro-Trump proposals generated over the past months at Psy Group, is unknown.
Zamel then asked Don Jr. whether a Psy Group campaign conducted to benefit his father that was paid for by Nader would present a conflict to the campaign.
Trump Jr. replied that it would not, further stating that a Psy Group social media campaign wouldn’t conflict with the Trump campaign’s own social media efforts.
The exact nature of the events that transpired in the immediate aftermath of the meeting is hazy, with the various players involved later providing conflicting testimony and recollections.
Zamel testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Nader “circumvented” him and continued communicating with Donald Trump Jr. on his own, leaving him “cut out.”
Zamel admitted that Erik Prince encouraged Nader to pay Zamel for the services he outlined to Trump Jr., telling Nader “[y]ou should pay him.”
Zamel later claimed that he offered Nader a quote of “five to ten [million dollars]” to begin the work and that Nader agreed to pay up to $5 million.
Despite this, Zamel denies that Psy Group did any work on behalf of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election.
A few days after the November election, Zamel testified that Nader reached out to him and asked that he prepare a presentation on the impact social media had on the outcome of the presidential contest.
Zamel claims not to have utilized experts on these matters employed at Psy Group to prepare the presentation, but rather delegated the task to a minority owner of Psy Group named Daniel Green, despite the fact that Green had no expertise in data analytics, polling or political analysis.
Stranger still, Zamel maintained that Green simply “Googled a bunch of articles” in the course of his research and the presentation he produced was prefaced by the statement: “This is an academic study based on open source materials.”
In January of 2017, Zamel delivered the presentation to Nader in New York. He claims that he never provided Nader with a physical or electronic copy of the presentation.
Zamel further claims that the presentation was transported from Israel to New York on a thumb drive, presented to Nader on an individual laptop, and then returned to Israel on the thumbdrive.
After delivering the presentation to Nader, Zamel claims that Nader told him that he planned to share its content with “the young man,” which Zamel interpreted to mean Donald Trump Jr.
After delivering the presentation to Nader in New York, Zamel returned to Israel with the thumb drive.
He claims that Nader never again asked about the presentation, which is strange as Zamel informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that Nader had paid him “over a million dollars” for it.
A source speaking to The New York Times characterized the amount as “up to $2 million.” Zamel claimed Nader’s payment was made “from his personal account to a business entity related to me,” and that the payment was made before Nader heard the presentation.
According to Zamel, Nader never asked about the presentation again. Zamel further claims that he deleted the presentation from both the thumbdrive and the laptop.
It seems strange, even unbelievable, that George Nader would spend $1–2 million to hear a single presentation based on publicly available information, not even bother to get a copy of the presentation itself, and then never ask about it again.
Obvious questions sprout from these inexplicable circumstances. Given that Joel Zamel explicitly asked Donald Trump Jr. if it would pose a conflict to the campaign for George Nader to pay for a social media campaign as outlined by Psy Group to be conducted on behalf of Donald Trump’s candidacy, that Donald Trump Jr. explicitly told him that it would not and that Erik Prince encouraged Nader to do so, is that in fact what happened?
No evidence of such a campaign has been uncovered.
Still more questions remain.
What information exactly was contained in the January presentation delivered by Zamel to Nader and why did Zamel subsequently delete it without any backup copies?
What exactly was George Nader paying for when he personally sent Zamel $1–2 million?
Erik Prince’s support of the Trump campaign continued after the August 3rd Trump Tower meeting.
In September, he donated $100,000 to the pro-Trump Super PAC Make America Number 1, which was led by Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of the billionaire recluse and top Trump supporter, Robert Mercer.
In addition to political contributions, Erik Prince provided further services to both the Trump campaign and, later, the Trump administration.
During the transition, Erik Prince clandestinely traveled to the Seychelles where he met with Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, to discuss setting up a backchannel between Trump and Putin.