Tuesday, April 4, 2017

WaPo: Blackwater founder “apparently” tried to open back channel to Russia for Trump transition with help of UAE


ALLAHPUNDIT, hotair.com

image (not from article) from

Excerpt:
Lots of heavy breathing about this on political Twitter this afternoon — Russia! Blackwater! Secret meetings! The Middle East! Steve Bannon! — but there’s no allegation of wrongdoing that I can see, unless you think “back channel” diplomacy by an incoming White House is per se illicit. The strangest thing about it appears to be the timing. The meeting between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and the Russian liaison was allegedly held on January 11th, just nine days before the inauguration. Why open a “back channel” when Trump would be president and able to open a front channel in just nine days? ...
As for why Trump might have preferred a back channel, even so close to the inauguration, that’s easy — because of the Russiagate probe, any publicly visible diplomacy with Moscow would have made the accusations of collusion during the campaign even shriller than they already were. In fact, it was just one day before Prince’s meeting that BuzzFeed published the infamous “Trump dossier” compiled by a former British intel agent. Public diplomacy with Russia over Iran would have also been risky in that it might have alarmed Tehran, which might then have behaved unpredictably in Syria or in terms of its nuclear obligations to the U.S. ...

No comments: