Blackwater Brass Rips 'Spineless, Worthless' Jeff Sessions
On the eve of Erik Prince’s testimony before the House’s Russia investigators, his former guns-for-hire are going after the attorney general—who’s caught in the Russia probe, too.
BETSY WOODRUFF
11.30.17 5:00 AM ET
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a new group of critics: former officials at Blackwater, the military contracting firm that was sold and renamed after its connection to the killings of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in 2007.
That’s because in the ten years since those deaths in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, the Justice Department has taken an aggressive and sometimes unorthodox approach to prosecuting four former Blackwater contractors for those killings. And that aggressive stance is continuing under Sessions.
The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is set testify before the House intelligence committee on Nov. 30 as part of its Russia probe. And that gives the dispute an additional dimension. Two key players in the unfolding Trump-Russia drama are now at odds: Sessions, who keeps remembering more and more discussions about—and meetings with—Kremlin officials; and Prince, who reportedly had a secret meeting with a Putin crony earlier this year in an attempt to open a back channel between the Kremlin and the Trump White House.
Three Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 under a firearm statute that is generally used to go after violent criminals connected to drug trafficking. They were each sentenced to 30 years in prison under that charge. But in August—a few months after Sessions became attorney general—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit found those lengthy sentences to be cruel and unusual punishment, noting that the Justice Department had never before used the law that way.
A fourth contractor, Nick Slatten, got a life sentence for murder. But, in a defeat for the Justice Department, that same D.C. circuit appellate panel vacated the conviction and tossed that sentence and ordered that Slatten be tried again. He is still incarcerated, and Sessions’ prosecutors at the Justice Department are getting ready to retry him.
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