Former MI6 officer working to get Trump re-elected

A former officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – better known as MI6) is secretly working for the Trump re-election campaign.

According to the New York Times (NYT), Richard Seddon, who previously worked for MI6, was recruited by Erik Prince, a security contractor aligned to the current US administration, to “infiltrate liberal groups” opposed to Trump.

Prince’s job was to recruit former American and British spies to service operations run by Project Veritas, a conservative group which uses undercover and underhand methods to target liberal and progressive causes.

According to NYT, Seddon ran an operation in 2017 to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in America.

The AFT is opposed to many of the policies of the Trump Administration, particularly on the issue of arming teachers at schools as a means of preventing or containing mass shootings.

Dark arts 

Using his intelligence skills, Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the AFT’s local leaders hoping to collect information which could inflict reputational damage on the organization.

The same operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, by using a different alias and cover story.

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, Spanberger proceeded to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat, despite Seddon’s and Prince’s best efforts to stop her.

Prince, who is the former head of the private military company Blackwater Worldwide, has close ties to Trump’s aides and family. He is reported to periodically serve as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.

A company of spies 

According to NYT, Prince developed an interest in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Seddon was reportedly Prince’s main man in terms of identifying and approaching former spies with a view to bringing them on board the operation.

Seddon would then instruct the former spies to provide a wide range of intelligence training to Project Veritas operatives, including how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings and other covert surveillance techniques.

Seddon vs Steele 

The involvement of Seddon in a pro-Trump intelligence operation is reminiscent of the role played by another former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, this time against Trump’s interests.

A co-founder of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence, Steel compiled a dossier on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia on behalf of the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential race.

The so-called Steele dossier has become increasingly discredited, with the former MI6 officer accused of either embellishing or making up some of his findings.

Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later concluded that “much of the material” in the dossier “could not be corroborated”, before adding that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent” with evidence collected by the FBI and that the “limited information that was corroborated” was often “publicly available”.

British subversion 

However, Steele remains defiant and only yesterday he told a gathering at the Oxford Union that Trump dislikes intelligence work because its “ground truth” conflicts with his worldview and leadership style.

The involvement of former MI6 officers in ostensibly private intelligence roles for and against Trump speaks to British intelligence’s desire to influence the American political process.

But the American establishment appears content to ignore MI6’s role in subverting the US system, instead preferring to focus all attention on alleged Russian meddling in internal US affairs.

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