Former Navy SEAL and ex-Blackwater CEO Erik Prince discussed his potential primary challenge to Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
“I’ve had a connection to Wyoming since 1992,” Prince said. “I actually have a house here, was a Wyoming resident for many years while I was in the SEAL teams and later. So yeah, there’s definitely potential.”
“I think all of the Republican Establishment needs a challenge. They need to be held to account. They need to drive an agenda for America, not for the Beltway,” he declared.
“Having been around the Beltway for some years, you know the five wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D.C. It’s like a big gravitational field,” Prince said. “When you send people there, they get sucked into the Beltway madness. A winnowing, a housecleaning, does have to occur. All these people that don’t go with what their districts or their states sent them to do, but instead are pulled into what the Beltway has them do, they need to be sent home.”
“He’s a very nice man,” Prince said of his prospective primary opponent, Senator John Barrasso. “But from the state of Wyoming, where the Republican wins with 75 percent of the vote typically, year to year – 75 percent! – the delegation from Wyoming should be the most rock-ribbed conservative. They should be leading the charge on these issues, and not going along to get along. That’s why Mr. Barrasso needs a challenger.”
Marlow asked Prince to lay out the top issues he would run on.
“I did a road trip with the Breitbart border security guys, Brandon Darby and his team, in January,” Prince recalled. “Drove from Laredo all the way out through the Arizona border. Let me tell you, folks: the idea of a border wall is needed, it is required, and it is a gaping hole. It’s actually an embarrassment. The United States of America, even to be spending what we are on TSA and all these other forms of security, that our back door is that wide open.”
“I’ve walked the border, driven the border, and it’s a joke,” he said. “There has to be a massive improvement there. And you can’t talk about all the other kinds of immigration reform until you actually secure the borders.”
Marlow mentioned another issue where Prince has been deeply and publicly involved, the Trump administration’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. He credited Prince’s proposal to privatize Afghanistan security operations with influencing the administration to send fewer additional troops than some officials wanted, even though Prince’s plan was not adopted.
“We need to keep relentless pressure on terrorism,” said Prince. “We can’t give these roaches the ability to fester and to attack the homeland, of course. But after 16 years – we just crossed the 16th anniversary of war in Afghanistan. It’s now to the point where our sons and daughters can be fighting the same fight that the parents were. It’s far and away our longest war, and the Pentagon is doing the same thing, the same game plan they’ve been doing the last 16 years. Enough is enough on that.”
“We were very close, I think, on shifting the president’s policy on this, but in the end he rolled and went with the foreign policy establishment. We now have in many ways a foreign policy that’s indiscernible from what Hillary Clinton would have. And a lot of the same people in the Pentagon and national security apparatus that Hillary Clinton would have there. That is a great frustration, and that certainly what we campaigned hard for Donald Trump for,” he said.
Prince concluded by saying he would make his final decision about jumping into the Wyoming GOP Senate primary “in the next few weeks.”
“I’m trying to figure out the best way I can try to help my country be safe, and secure, and prosperous,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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