A meeting in the Seychelles weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration between a Russian executive and a top Republican donor close to the Trump transition team has drawn the scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller, who has heard testimony that appears to conflict with an account of the same meeting given earlier to House investigators, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators have heard testimony from a witness that the donor, Erik Prince, wasn’t introduced to the Russian by intermediaries from the United Arab Emirates, as he had told the House panel, the people said.
Mr. Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm, told the House Intelligence Committee in November that he had traveled to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, and his associates to discuss “potential business in the future,” according to a public transcript released by the panel, which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
During his stay in January 2017, Mr. Prince said he also met with the Russian executive, Kirill Dmitriev. Mr. Prince told lawmakers that the meeting with Mr. Dmitriev was a short, chance encounter at the hotel bar and was arranged by a member of Mr. Zayed’s delegation. Mr. Dmitriev is the chief executive of an investment fund created by the Russian government and is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, testimony earlier this year from George Nader, an adviser close to UAE’s crown prince who is cooperating with Mr. Mueller’s investigation, has contradicted Mr. Prince’s account, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Nader told Mr. Mueller’s investigators that he attended Mr. Prince’s meeting with the Emirati delegation and that the Emiratis didn’t make the introduction between Mr. Prince and Mr. Dmitriev, the people said.
Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating whether the meeting was an effort to create a back channel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Mueller’s inquiry is part of a much broader probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether there was any collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied, calling the investigation a “witch hunt.” Moscow has denied meddling.
Mr. Nader has been cooperating with Mr. Mueller since January, when investigators stopped him at Dulles Airport and served him with a subpoena, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
A spokesman for Mr. Prince and a spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. Mr. Nader couldn’t be reached for comment. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the early months of the Trump administration, Mr. Nader visited the White House several times, discussing U.S. foreign policy toward Gulf Arab states with administration officials, including Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mr. Mueller has evidence that the Seychelles meeting was an effort to create a back channel between the Trump team and Russia.
At the time of the meeting, Mr. Prince had close ties to the Trump team, which he maintained after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. The brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Mr. Prince held meetings in the Trump transition offices before the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Prince contributed more than $280,000 to the Trump campaign, the Republican Party and a pro-Trump super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Mr. Dmitriev was appointed to his role by Mr. Putin and meets frequently with the Russian president to brief him on the activities of his fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, whose parent company was hit by U.S. sanctions.
Before Mr. Prince’s meeting with Mr. Zayed in the Seychelles, the crown prince had met in December 2016 with top Trump transition officials in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. The Trump officials who attended that meeting included then-incoming national security adviser Mike Flynn, as well as Mr. Kushner and Mr. Bannon, according to the people.
Mr. Nader didn’t attend that three-hour meeting, but greeted Emirati officials as they were departing, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Prince had crossed paths with Mr. Nader years earlier, when he hired Mr. Nader as a business development consultant in Iraq, according to a 2010 deposition by Mr. Prince as part of a lawsuit against his former company, Blackwater.
Mr. Nader remained in close contact with White House allies, receiving updates about activity in the West Wing. Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser close to the president, sent Mr. Nader a memo last fall summarizing an October meeting he had with the president and other top advisers. The memo was included in a cache of emails from Mr. Broidy’s and his wife’s email accounts provided to the Journal.
In the memo, Mr. Broidy—who serves as national deputy finance chairman at the Republican National Committee—said he told the president that he had met with top Emirati officials, including Mr. Zayed, on behalf of his defense company. The memo also said Mr. Broidy had urged Mr. Trump to support a plan “being constructed” by Mr. Zayed to create a regional counterterrorism task force.
Mr. Broidy described Mr. Trump’s response as “extremely enthusiastic,” and said he urged the president to have a “quiet meeting” with Mr. Zayed in New York or New Jersey.
“President Trump agreed that a meeting with MBZ was a good idea,” Mr. Broidy wrote in the memo.
Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com
Mueller tight-lipped as media leaks shape Russia narrative
Leaked glimpses of special counsel Robert Mueller's activities tell an incomplete story, angering some Trump associates — but likely serving the purposes of others.
Special counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors aren’t talking to the media, but still the leaks keep coming.
In the past two weeks, anonymously sourced news reports have said the top federal Russia investigator is preparing to indict Russians for hacking Democratic emails in 2016; focusing on why one of President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyers was in talks about a Moscow real estate deal during the campaign; asking questions about Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s business dealings; and probing whether the United Arab Emirates improperly sought to influence Trump White House policy.
Through it all, Mueller has said nothing in public — so far speaking only with indictments, like last month’s charges against Russian nationals accused of election interference, that had not been foreshadowed in the media.
That’s a textbook stance for a prosecutor who must avoid tipping off potential targets or wrongly incriminating people. But the former FBI director’s no-comment policy has also created an powerful information vacuum, one being filled by witnesses, lawyers and others who have caught glimpses of his advancing probe, and who feed the media selective details that serve their personal agendas — but which may or may not accurately reflect Mueller’s main avenues of inquiry.
"What makes leaks and false leads so pernicious is that those doing them know a professional and ethical prosecutor cannot and will not be able to correct the record each and every time,” said Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, who insists that recent leaks have unfairly suggested that Mueller is closing in on his client.
“That leaves those with improper motives — and who are often violating the law or rules governing investigations — the freedom to do the mischief they intend,” Lowell added.
Such complaints serve Lowell’s own purposes, of course, and Kushner may well face serious legal jeopardy. But it is impossible to tell from reports alleging that Mueller is pursuing a certain avenue of inquiry, like Kushner’s finances, whether he is vigorously closing in on a target — or simply running down every lead.
Legal experts said Mueller likely finds the deluge of leaks irksome, but also an inevitable part of his job.
“I’m sure that the special counsel’s office is not pleased to see matters that are relevant to their investigation spinning out of control in the press,” said Melinda Haag, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Mueller when he was a U.S. attorney in the late 1990s. “But I’m guessing they don’t view it as their job to try to manage that.”
Mueller has shown he’s determined to avoid leaks on his own. High-profile visitors are whisked into the special counsel’s Washington headquarters from a heavily guarded underground garage, out of sight of the TV cameras camped out on the sidewalks below. Before being dismissed, witnesses are admonished not to talk about their visits.
So far, Mueller has only spoken to the public through court documents bearing his signature and those of his deputy prosecutors. A motion filed last summer to keep sealed the charges against former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulous explained the reasoning. Public disclosure “may alert other subjects to the direction and status of the investigation,” Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky wrote, and prompt them to “destroy or conceal incriminating evidence.”
Several of the attorneys representing clients mired in the Russia probe told POLITICO they appreciate Mueller’s no-comment policy.
“Mueller is doing it the right way,” said one lawyer. “The most important thing he’s trying to do is create trust and trust that people who give him information know that it is not going to be leaked.”
Lowell argued that the media abets sources who take advantage of the special counsel’s refusal to issue even simple confirmations or denials.
“Unfortunately, the media are all too willing partners in this arrangement often encouraging this conduct and providing cover to these leakers by giving them attributions that make it impossible for there to be accountability,” Lowell said.
Stephen Ryan, the personal attorney for Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, took issue this week with the media coverage surrounding his client. A Tuesday Washington Post story said the special counsel is examining Cohen’s role in a proposed Trump Tower Moscow project and in a January 2017 effort to deliver a Ukrainian lawmaker’s Ukraine-Russia peace plan to the incoming Trump administration.
Ryan insists that Cohen faces no specific legal jeopardy from Mueller. “Unsourced innuendo like this succeeds only because the leakers know the special counsel will not respond to set the record straight,” he said.
There’s little Mueller can do to stymie leaks about his methods. Regular press briefings are a nonstarter, veteran law enforcement officials say, and providing statements on a case-by-case basis is an imperfect solution.
If Mueller’s office were to deny even one story, failure to refute others could be interpreted as tacit confirmation.
Veteran journalist Steven Brill, who in 1998 notched the first on-the-record interview with independent counsel Kenneth Starr more than four years into his investigation of President Bill Clinton, said Mueller is doing a service to everyone involved by not speaking to reporters or by leaking information in other ways. (Starr controversially admitted to Brill that he’d been giving background details to the media. It’s impossible to rule out that Mueller has had similar contact with reporters, but there is no evidence of it and longtime associates call it highly unlikely.)
“Because he’s stayed out of the press and hasn’t tried to defend himself, he comes off as more credible,” Brill said. Mueller’s approach also benefits the investigation’s trajectory.
“The power of Mueller’s work is that everything he does is a complete surprise,” he said. “Therefore it has more impact on the people he’s trying to scare or maybe trying to impress into responding to him.”
Mueller also knows he can’t control witnesses once they leave his office. That was evident in the Monday spectacle of former Trump political adviser Sam Nunberg, who openly discussed his interactions with Mueller’s team — even sharing a copy of a recent subpoena for his communications with the president and other inner-circle Trump aides. It was the most candid discussion to date by any witness of his or her dealings with Mueller’s office.
In light of Nunberg’s behavior, Haag said the special counsel and his prosecutors are likely reassessing their interactions with future witnesses.
“They might think long and hard about each potential interview and decide what the chances are of this person doing what Mr. Nunberg has done and decide whether the interview is important enough to take that risk,” she said.
Making sure each witness has a lawyer who can advise against leaking helps, she said. But even there, Nunberg demonstrated on Monday that may not matter. The former Trump aide repeatedly told reporters that he was speaking publicly without giving his attorney any warning he would speak out.
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