Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Has Blood Ties to Mercenaries
by DAVID AXE
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, goes before the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for her hearing on Jan. 17.
It could be a difficult hearing for the 59-year-old Michigander. Not the least because DeVos’s brother is a notorious war-profiteer.
At her hearing, DeVos will have to answer to Democratic senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for a number of, um, questionable ties and positions.
DeVos, a billionaire donor to the Republican Party who has no experience as an educator, is an advocate for for-profit charter schools, including explicitly religious schools that — under her conception of “public” education — would receive government funding. In direct violation of the U.S. constitution’s separation of church and state.
Equally damaging for DeVos, Trump’s transition team has admitted that the billionaire failed to list on her ethics questionnaire a $125,000 political donation.
And then there’s her brother. Erik Prince, a 47-year-old U.S. Navy SEAL, founded mercenary company Blackwater in 1997. The company netted some $2 billion from the military, CIA and State Department during the Iraq war.
In September 2007, Blackwater mercenaries gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at Nisoor Square in Baghdad. In 2014, three of the Blackwater employees got 14 federal manslaughter charges between them.
Hounded by lawsuits, in 2010 Prince sold his stake in Blackwater and moved to the United Arab Emirates. There Prince founded Reflex Responses.
In 2011, several Arab countries hired Prince to form a private army of 2,000 Somali recruits. The same year, the UAE signed a $529-million contract with Reflex Responses to recruit and train an 800-member counterterrorism and internal-security force.
Today Prince heads Frontier Resource Group, a logistics and transport company working in Africa. And Prince is also reportedly running a private air war over Libya. According to Intelligence Online and my own site War Is Boring, pilots under Prince’s employ are flying Emirati air force Air Tractor attack planes on missions supporting Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s militia in Libya.
Haftar’s Libyan National Army backs the nascent regime in Tobruk, which is vying with the Government of National Accord in Tripoli — not to mention various Islamic armed groups — for control of Libya.
LNA and Emirati air strikes have reportedly killed civilians.
Prince’s overseas war-profiteering has not gone unnoticed in the United States. In April 2016, The Intercept published a story accusing Prince of illegally weaponizing Air Tractor-style aircraft — the same kind of planes that Prince’s pilots are reportedly flying in Libya on behalf of the Emirati air force.
Prince allegedly hid behind a network of shell companies, concealing the real nature of the airplane modifications from Frontier Services Group’s own board. The Justice Department and other federal agencies are reportedly investigating Prince for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to The Intercept.
Blood aside, it’s not clear what DeVos’ legal and financial ties are to Prince. If there’s any justice, Sanders and Warren will at least ask about those ties. America doesn’t need its top education official to answer in any way to a relative whose business is war-for-profit.
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