The secret Seychelles meeting Robert Mueller is zeroing in on, explained

Special counsel Robert Mueller has gotten a new cooperator in the Russia investigation. And he’s testifying about what, exactly, happened at a mysterious meeting between a Trump associate and a Russian fund manager in the Seychelles, an East African archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean.

The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti, David Kirkpatrick, and Adam Goldman reported Tuesday night that George Nader — an adviser to the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates — is cooperating with Mueller’s probe. In a sign of his importance to the investigation, Nader testified before a grand jury last week.

That’s big because Nader helped organize, and attended, that curious Seychelles meeting on January 11, 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The meeting brought together Erik Prince, Trump donor and founder of the private security company Blackwater, with Kirill Dmitriev, who manages a Russian sovereign wealth fund and is thought to be close to Vladimir Putin.

Anonymous sources have long claimed to reporters that the purpose of the Seychelles meeting was for Trump’s team to covertly communicate with Putin’s team. After all, it happened just weeks after Jared Kushner reportedly told the Russians that he wanted to set up a backchannel through which they could communicate.

But Prince has hotly denied that that’s what happened, including in sworn testimony last year. He said he just made the Seychelles trip for business reasons, that he was in no way representing Trump, and that the meeting with Dmitriev was both entirely unplanned on his end and completely uneventful.

It appears, though, that Nader is telling the grand jury otherwise. The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Devlin Barrett repored Wednesday that Nader is saying the meeting was “an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin” — and that Mueller has other evidence to that effect, as well.

We don’t yet know the specifics of what Nader is saying as part of his semi-voluntary cooperation (the FBI questioned him at Dulles Airport after a flight last month and seized his electronics, per the Times). But if Prince was acting on the Trump’s team behalf, it would demolish months worth of denials from both him and the White House that he was doing any such thing. And it would raise serious questions about just why, exactly, all parties involved were so set on keeping the Seychelles meeting secret.

The cast of characters for the Seychelles meeting

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The people present to meet at the Seychelles on January 11, 2017, included the following:

Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, the private security / mercenary company that scored big contracts from George W. Bush’s administration (and some of whose employees were accused of killing Iraqi civilians). Prince has since sold Blackwater (which renamed itself) and gone out in search of new lines of mercenary business. Prince donated about $250,000 to Trump’s campaign and to outside groups supporting Trump, and was in contact with Steve Bannon during the transition. He also happens to be he brother of controversial Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

MBZ, or Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, is the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. MBZ did business with Erik Prince several years ago — the UAE awarded Prince a contract worth several hundred million dollars “to help assemble an internal paramilitary force,” per the Washington Post. Diplomatically, the UAE regime is close to Saudi Arabia, and unfriendly to Qatar and Iran.

George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who has a decades-long history in international diplomacy, has lately advised MBZ. He visited the White House several times in 2017. He also at one point consulted for Blackwater.

Kirill Dmitriev manages the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion Russian-government established sovereign wealth fund that’s under US sanctions. He’s believed to be close to Vladimir Putin. His fund was until recently part of the Russian government-owned bank VneshEconomBank, or VEB.

Finally, there’s the setting — the Seychelles Islands is a tropical archipelago nation a few hundred miles off the coast of eastern Africa. Its government brags that it is “the kind of place where you can have a good time away from the media.”

The context of the Seychelles meeting

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Potentially relevant context for the Seychelles meeting is that there were several other meetings of the various factions involved the month before, mostly happening in Trump Tower.

On December 1, 2016, Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn secretly met in Trump Tower with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Kisyak reported back to his bosses that, at this meeting, Kushner said he wanted to set up a secret communications channel between the Trump Team and Russia. (Kushner denies that this happened.)

Days later, the Washington Post received an anonymous letter revealing that this secret meeting happened and who was present (though they couldn’t confirm it for several more months). The letter also claimed that, at the meeting, Kushner, Flynn, and Kislyak discussed setting up a meeting between a Trump representative and a Russian in some third country, and concluded Flynn was too high-profile to go.

On December 12, Kislyak returned to Trump Tower and met with Kushner’s deputy. Then, on the following day, Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian-government owned bank VEB, stopped by to meet with Kushner. Again, these meetings remained secret for months.

Then, on December 15, 2016, a little over a month after Trump won the presidential election, the United Arab Emirates crown prince, MBZ, flew to the United States. There, he met with several Trump transition officials, including Flynn, Kushner, and Steve Bannon. What was strange about this was that MBZ did not inform the Obama administration that he was traveling to the US, as major foreign leaders usually do. Trump’s team didn’t disclose the meeting either, and it too remained secret for several months.

Erik Prince also visited Trump Tower twice during the transition, to meet with Steve Bannon, he later testified.

What happened in the Seychelles: Erik Prince’s account

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Prince’s story of how he ended up going to the Seychelles and what took place there, which he gave under oath to the House Intelligence Committee on November 30, 2017, is as follows.

• One day, an aide to Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), the crown prince of the United Arab Emirate, invited Prince to fly out to the Seychelles and meet MBZ, offering few details. Prince characterizes the invitation as: “His Highness would like to see you if you can come out to the Seychelles.” Prince says he understood this as an invitation “to talk about potential business.”
• So Prince accepted, and flew out there on January 11, 2017. A meeting of about an hour ensued with MBZ, “a couple of his brothers,” and others in his entourage. They discussed general issues in the field but no specific business proposal was made.
• Toward the end of the meeting, Prince testified, someone in MBZ’s party casually “mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kirill Dmitriev from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund.” (Prince did not name Nader in his testimony.)
• Prince accepted, and met Dmitriev at the hotel bar one-on-one for no more than thirty minutes. They discussed general issues in the field but no specific business proposal was made. Prince then stayed in the hotel that night, and left the next morning.
• Overall, the meeting with Dmitriev was so uneventful that, he claims, he couldn’t even remember the man’s name a few months later. There was no follow-up to it. And Prince certainly never claimed in any way to be acting on behalf of Donald Trump.

Was this the secret US/Russia backchannel meeting that Kushner reportedly wanted?

The Washington Post was the first to unearth the Seychelles meeting, in a report by Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff and Karen DeYoung published last April, which was sourced to anonymous “U.S., European and Arab officials.” Their account of why and how the meeting happened was very different from Prince’s. They write:

Following the New York meeting between the Emiratis and Trump aides, Zayed was approached by Prince, who said he was authorized to act as an unofficial surrogate for the president-elect, according to the officials. He wanted Zayed to set up a meeting with a Putin associate. Zayed agreed and proposed the Seychelles as the meeting place because of the privacy it would afford both sides.

So, per the Post’s sources, it was Erik Prince who said he wanted the meeting, who said he was acting as a surrogate for president-elect Trump, and who asked MBZ’s team to put him in touch with a Putin confidant. The whole purpose of the meeting was to be a backchannel between Trump’s team and Putin’s team.

That would sure seem to make sense, since all this happened shortly after Kushner reportedly said he wanted a to establish a secret backchannel with Russia, and both MBZ and Prince made their own trips to see Trump officials not long after that. However, there was no actual proof of this.

Nader — and Mueller’s investigation more generally — could be providing the proof. It does not appear that Nader has been charged with anything, but the Times reported that when he landed at Dulles Airport on January 17 of this year, the FBI was waiting for him, at Mueller’s behest. They served him with a subpoena, questioned him and seized his electronics. They’ve questioned him several more times since, and he went before a grand jury for testimony last week.

It’s also worth noting that Michael Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigators since early December, and we haven’t seen any of the fruits of his cooperation yet. Flynn was present in the meeting in which Kushner reportedly told Kislyak he wanted a backchannel. He was also present when Kushner and Bannon met MBZ. He may well have told Mueller why the Seychelles meeting happened.

And if the Seychelles meeting was a backchannel — what actually came of it?

If it were to be proven that the Trump team wanted to set up the Seychelles meeting, the question would remain about what actually happened there — and why those involved wanted so badly to keep it secret.

One potential topic is, of course, the incoming administration’s foreign policy. In the first Post report on the meeting, their sources claimed that one topic of discussion was “whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria,” a topic that was very much of interest to the UAE.

But if this was merely about essentially above-board foreign policy discussions, it’s unclear why they would have had to happen with such secrecy, through a backchannel. (Rather than just waiting 9 days for Trump to be sworn in.)

Was money involved? The Russian who went to the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev, is a moneyman, after all. So is Sergey Gorkov, who met with Jared Kushner in Trump Tower weeks earlier. What’s more, Dmitriev’s fund was until 2016 actually part of the Russian government-owned bank Gorkov runs, VEB.

Furthermore, this week’s Times report says that Mueller “appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities,” and has previously asked whether Nader “funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts.” So he does seem to be following some sort of money trail.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously of all, there’s the possibility that this happened so that Trump’s team and Putin’s could secretly communicate about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. So far, there’s no specific evidence that that’s the case. But we clearly haven’t heard the last of the Seychelles meeting.

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Huffman High School shooting kills 17-year-old Birmingham girl, injures boy

A Huffman High School senior was killed and another injured when gunfire erupted inside a classroom at the east Birmingham school Wednesday afternoon. 

Killed was a 17-year-old girl who was going to graduate in May, had already been accepted into college and had dreams to become a nurse. “We’re not just talking about some person, we’re talking about losing a part of our future,” said Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin. “Our hearts are heavy.”

Also wounded in the shooting was a 17-year-old boy, a junior and member of the football team. Both were rushed to UAB Hospital in separate Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service trucks.

The girl, whose name is being withheld because some of her family has not yet been notified, was given CPR at the scene and en route to the hospital, but the efforts to revive her failed.

The boy was initially said to be critically injured, but hospital officials by 7:30 p.m. said he was seen in the emergency department and was no longer at the hospital. He was shot in the leg, and was later questioned at police headquarters.

School officials announced late Wednesday night that school will be closed on Thursday.

A school employee was evaluated by paramedics on site, and released at the scene.

The shots erupted shortly after 3 p.m. as school was dismissing for the day. Students who were still inside the school were ushered into classrooms or other secure locations during a temporary lockdown.

The scene at the school shortly after the shooting was relatively calm, considering what had happened inside. Many of the students, taking part in after-school athletics and other activities, said they didn’t hear the shots and didn’t know what happened until later.

One mother, who asked that her name not be used, said she was waiting for her daughter outside the school and called her child’s cell phone to ask what was taking so long. Her daughter, a basketball player, replied, “Mom, we’re on lockdown.”

They quickly learned of the shooting. “I was just hoping my baby was OK, that everybody was OK,” the mother said. “I was nervous. This is so sad.”

Police said at least two shots were fired but are still trying to sort out a timeline of events and what led to the gunfire. The gun used in the shooting was recovered from inside the school and Acting Birmingham Police Chief Orlando Wilson said they still believe the shooting may have been accidental.

“At this particular time, we consider it accidental until the investigation takes us elsewhere,” Wilson said. “We have a lot of unanswered questions. There are so many unknowns at this time.”

The chief made it clear the Huffman shooting was not similar to other recent school shootings across the country. “It’s not where someone from outside came into the school,” he said.

Wilson said there are surveillance cameras inside the school and police will be reviewing the footage to try to piece together what happened. “We’re hoping if we have footage, that it will reveal it,” he said. “If we have witnesses, we’re hoping they will tell it.”

There were multiple possibilities for what may have happened.

Sources said a male student was “showing off” his gun when it discharged, striking the female student. He then accidentally shot himself as he was putting the gun away, according to sources. Police officials did not confirm that account, or any of the other stories making the rounds.

“We’re not saying he shot her, we’re not saying he didn’t shoot her,” the chief said. “We’re asking those questions ourselves so we can determine exactly what happened.”

The chief said he had not been told of any kind of argument, fight or struggle preceding the shooting incident.

Wilson said multiple students were questioned as witnesses. As of 8 p.m., interviews were still ongoing at Birmingham Police Department headquarters downtown.

The chief appeared emotional while talking about the fatal shooting. “I’m deeply moved by what has happened here,” Wilson said. “This should not happen in schools.”

The chief did not give a timeline of when more information would be released. “What I will say here is let us do our job. We’ll give you the answers as they come,” he said. “Let us do due diligence and due process.”

Birmingham City Schools Superintendent Lisa Herring said she knows there are many tough days and tough questions ahead.

“Our goal is to reassure our parents that, as much as we can, we will work to keep our schools safe. But our hearts and our minds are on the families tonight,” she said. “How do we tell parents that their school is safe after an event like this and how do we reassure our children? That is the work we will take on every single day.”

Herring at first said security will be heightened at the school on Thursday and in the days to come but later Wednesday night said classes would be cancelled Thursday.

The beefed-up security presence will not take place just at Huffman High School, but at all city schools. Just last week, police and school officials investigated a reported threat at Huffman Middle School. While the threat was not deemed valid, a gun was found on school property outside one of the entrance door, believed to have been put there when police and school officials were scanning students and checking backpacks.

“This is not a Birmingham City Schools dilemma alone, it’s much broader,” Herring said.

Herring said Huffman High School does have working metal detectors in use but declined to comment further as it is part of the ongoing investigation. In addition to increased security at the school Thursday, the superintendent said said there will be a full crisis team on hand to help students and faculty.

She praised the school officials on hand during Wednesday’s shooting. “For as much as they’ve had to tackle on a very difficult day, they have done an exceptional job of trying to provide care and concern for those who were in the building and for those who had exited out,” she said.

Wilson, Herring and the mayor all said it’s important to think about all of those involved. All were planning to meet with the families of those involved in the shooting.

“We had two victims today, regardless of the circumstances,” Herring said of both students. “We are most concerned about our families and the child who is no longer with us. We will not only pledge every effort to support the family, but we will do that for every child in Birmingham City Schools.”

“I think it’s really important we find a way to mourn with the family. That we wrap our arms around the Huffman High School community,” Woodfin said. “Our entire Birmingham community is in mourning and grief right now. While there are many questions …we need to take to the time realize that a life was lost. “

The shooting sparked concern statewide.

“I am saddened to learn about the death of the Huffman High School student. I am praying for the family of this young lady who has tragically lost her life way too early,” said Gov. Kay Ivey. “Every life is precious and, even though this was an accident, it reaffirms that there is no place for students to have firearms or other weapons on campus.”

The shooting took place the day after Ivey created a school safety council in Alabama to make recommendations on security. The security plan would ensure schools have an updated security response plan for sharing information about potential threats. It also would require schools to train students and school employees on how to respond to an emergency situation.

Multiple bills have been proposed in the Alabama legislature after 17 people were killed last month in a shooting rampage at a Parkland, Florida, high school. Varying proposals by Republicans would arm either teachers or volunteer security forces in schools. Measures sought by Democrats would seek to limit or ban the sale of assault weapons. They all face a tight deadline before the end of Alabama’s legislative session this election year.

“My heart is breaking for those hurt and killed in the shooting at Huffman High School.” said U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell. “I cannot imagine the grief of the parents who lost their little girl today to gun violence. She was a part of our community’s future. Tonight, my prayers are with her, the other victim, and their families.”

“We have a responsibility to protect our schools from gun violence, accidental or otherwise,” Sewell said. “Every year more students and teachers, sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters are killed in school shootings – we need to do everything in our power to make this incident the last. We cannot settle for symbolic gestures in Congress when our children’s lives are at stake.”

The shooting came exactly three weeks after police say a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in south Florida, in what was one of the worst school shootings in history, The Washington Post reported.

The Huffman shooting is the first school shooting since that incident, and the third this year that left students dead, that report stated. An ongoing Washington Post analysis has found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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