Erik, Prince of Darkness

As always these days, there are so many stories that would normally dominate coverge for weeks. And right now we have COVID-19, which when combined with the incompetent federal response, deserves the kind of coverage it's getting, so there's not a lot of air left for anything else.

So you may have missed yesterday's Erik Prince story in the New York Times, which in any other administration would have (yada yada yada)...

Without saying using the exact words, Adam Serwer gave the story the "if this happened in a Third World country" treatment via Twitter:

Disgraced paramilitary leader aligned with regime party pays spies to infiltrate and suppress domestic political opposition on behalf of the head of state.

And that is exactly the root of it. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's brother Erik, former head of military contractor Blackwater International, hired a bunch of former U.S. and British spies to infiltrate Democratic campaigns and labor unions, including one of the state teachers' unions. Among other things, he wanted the spies to teach the inept "journalists" of Project Veritas how to be better at their monkey-wrenching ways.

Erik Prince is a busy billionaire guy. He's also under investigation for lying "to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws" and in 2017 his mercenaries were almost put in charge of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

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According to the Times,

Once a small operation running on a shoestring budget, Project Veritas in recent years has had a surge in donations from both private donors and conservative foundations. According to its latest publicly available tax filing, Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018. Mr. O’Keefe [the guy who pretended to be a pimp in the ACORN sting videos of 2009 and was arrested for entering Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's office under false pretenses in 2010] earned about $387,000.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations doing real work to help people struggle to exist.