Spying on teacher union, aided by DeVos' brother, raises liberty issues
Blackwater USA co-founder Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in 2017. Credit: AP / Jacquelyn Martin
Erik Prince is the global security contractor who co-founded Blackwater USA, which played a shadowy role in the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq.
Since its sale to investors in 2011, the entity has been called Academi.
As a connected and wealthy supporter of President Donald Trump, Prince was involved in the 2016 presidential campaign. Later, congressional investigators and former special counsel Robert Mueller raised questions about Prince's meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in 2017.
Prince happens to be the brother of Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos. She is the nation's most powerful nemesis of the teachers' unions.
According to The New York Times, Prince helped recruit an ex-spy for Britain's MI6 agency for a secret operation that copied files and recorded conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers.
The surveillance was carried out by Project Veritas, which claims status as a news organization but has acted for years as a provocateur for right-wing causes.
AFT president Randi Weingarten said after her organization sued Project Veritas that it "used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy — and they got caught.
"We're just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage."
Her remarks make the operation sound like the AFT's foes were cheating in a game between competing power groups. But for ordinary people, including her members, this may be less a matter of "Spy vs. Spy" than an empowered clique sabotaging the actions of targeted organizations and individuals.
There is no evidence so far that DeVos was a party to the AFT intrigue. More pointedly than the concerns Weingarten expresses, the episode raises the question of whether it's acceptable for pro-Trump operatives to inspect union files and record conversations that may be considered the business of ordinary municipal employees.
In the 1970s, congressional investigators and whistleblowers exposed illegal CIA activities that included domestic spying programs, infiltration of anti-war organizations and attempted interventions abroad.
In the last decade, the National Security Agency's vast surveillance program raised alarms over individual freedoms once its reach was discovered.
These more recent activities are privatized.
In 2015, the Trump Foundation gave $20,000 to the controversial Project Veritas.
In 2016, Prince worked with subsequently convicted Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
In 2017, Prince suggested that the White House and Pentagon move to replace American troops with contractors in Afghanistan.
Then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis rejected that idea.
"When Americans put their nation's credibility on the line, privatizing it is probably not a wise idea," the retired Marine general said in August 2018.
Mattis left the administration about four months later, telling the president in a letter that he has a right to an appointee "whose views are better aligned with yours." They reportedly had fallen out over the U.S. withdrawal in Syria.
Whether the Trump operations in question are public or private, the key question is whether they come out on the side of American freedom. In the AFT intrigue, you have to wonder.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
