In January 2017, a bank manager at the National Bank of
Egypt in Cairo received a letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian
intelligence service asking them “kindly withdraw” about $10 million in cash
from the organization’s account.
That took place just five
days before Trump became president, The Washington Post reported in
an exclusive (click link for full longer original story).
Federal
investigators believed the withdrawn cash may have been intended as a bribe for
the Republican.
According to bank records, the state-run branch emptied a
considerable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency by filling two large
bags with bundles of $100 bills weighing a combined 200 pounds. Later four men
arrived to carry away the bags.
This sizable withdrawal caught the attention of federal
investigators early in 2019, reviving a secret criminal investigation that had
begun two years prior into allegations contained in a classified U.S.
intelligence assessment that Egypt's dictator, Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, had agreed
to give $10 million to Trump's campaign.
In office, Trump repeatedly praised Sisi, his administration
releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that had been held up over
concern about Egypt's abysmal human rights record.
Candidates for federal
office are barred from accepting foreign donations.
There is no proof that any
money made it to Trump's coffers, but as the Post reported that could in part
be due to the fact they were unable to subpoena the former president's bank
records for the time he was in office.
Trump had, in October
2016, injected $10 million into his own campaign in the form of a loan; this
after meeting with Sisi when he was in New York for a trip to the United
Nations.
The investigation was closed under former AG Bill Barr, a Trump loyalist who reportedly questioned whether there was
sufficient evidence to continue the probe, which has not been renewed under present AG Merrick Garland under President Joe Biden.
“Investigators were blocked from seeking key records to
determine if Trump took the money, then the case was shut down,” the Washington
Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig writes.
News of this investigation comes on top of that regarding Sen.
Bob Menendez (D-NJ) who himself was recently was convicted
of accepting bribes from the Egyptian government.
“$10M cash withdrawal
drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt” (formatted
emphasis to fit the blog below).
Trump’s appointees
rejected efforts to search for additional evidence investigators believed might
provide answers, then AG Barr closed the case.
The History: Five days before Trump became president in January
2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an
organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to
“kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in
cash.
Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were
soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to
records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S.
officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200
pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S.
currency.
Federal investigators
learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in
2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun
two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian
President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his
2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Since receiving the
intelligence about Sisi, the Barr DOJ had been examining whether money moved
from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S.
candidates from taking foreign funds.
Investigators had also sought to learn if
money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of
his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his
own money.
Those questions, in the view of several investigators on the case,
would never be answered (The Post found).
Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and
FBI agents were blocked by top DOJ officials from obtaining bank records they
believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people
familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the
investigation.
The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-AG
William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to
continue the probe of Trump.
The behind-the-scenes drama played out during
an especially tense time for the DOJ, with Trump accusing the agency of
pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russian
election interference, his appointees seeking to rein in investigators they saw
as partisan, and some career supervisors growing wary of plunging the agency
into yet another legal battle with the president.
AG Barr then directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S.
attorney in DC, to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate
if further investigation was warranted.
Barr later instructed FBI Director
Christopher Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr
described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people
familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what, if any, actions Wray, who was
also appointed by Trump, took in response.
Barr did not order the Egypt case closed, but his actions steered it
to that end, according to multiple people briefed on the case.
In June 2020, the prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the
office leading the case closed the probe, citing “a lack of sufficient evidence
to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That conclusion belied the months of internal disagreements
over whether investigators had been allowed to go far enough in seeking
that evidence.
One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss the internal dissension said: “Every American should be
concerned about how this case ended. The DOJ is supposed to follow evidence
wherever it leads — it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or
not.”
A spokesman for Trump’s
presidential campaign did not answer a list of questions from The Post, instead
referring to this story as “textbook Fake News.”
Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung (seen here) said by email: “The investigation
referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed. None of the allegations or
insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact. The Washington Post is
consistently played for suckers by Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors
peddling hoaxes and shams.”
Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Center spokesman, Ayman Walash
declined to answer detailed questions sent by The Post. He said in an email: “It is inappropriate to comment or refer to
rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by
Justice Departments.”
He then emphasized in his email that the DOJ had closed
the investigation without charges.
As he now campaigns to return to the White House, Trump has
cast himself as a victim of “deep state” plots that sought to undermine his
presidency, often focusing his ire on the Russia probe that shadowed much of
his time in office. That investigation did not ultimately find that Trump or
his campaign had conspired with Moscow.
But it did conclude his team expected
the campaign would benefit from Russian interference.
Unbeknownst to the public, during the same period, Justice
Department officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from
the government of another foreign country — Egypt.
Since the Egypt case
was closed, Sisi regime’s ambitions to
influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery
conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the former
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Over the course of his
presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian
leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.”
In 2018,
Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United
States had been withholding over human rights abuses — a move that had been
opposed by his first secretary of state — followed by the release of $1.2
billion more in such assistance.
The DOJ and the U.S. attorney’s office in
D.C. declined to answer detailed questions for this report. The FBI
declined to answer The Post’s questions or to make Wray available to comment.
Barr also declined to answer detailed questions for this report, and Liu did
not respond to a similar inquiry.
In an interview, Michael Sherwin, then-acting
U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated
national security cases, said: “I made the same decision here in cases before, and I stand
by it as in cases before.”
This exclusive account of the Egypt investigation is based
on a review of thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court
filings and exhibits.
The Post also interviewed more than two dozen people with
knowledge of the investigation. The individuals spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss a sensitive probe that ended without criminal charges.
Some showed The Post emails, texts and other documents corroborating their
accounts.
The investigation was shrouded in secrecy for the entirety
of the more than three years the case was open, from 2017 to 2020. It surfaced
obliquely in that time only once, when senior judges closed a part of the
federal courthouse in D.C. to hide the identities of the parties in a hearing
then described as involving a state-owned foreign corporation that was
resisting a subpoena. Many observers assumed the corporation was Russian.
In the final weeks of the
2020 presidential race, after the investigation had been closed, CNN revealed that
the mysterious courthouse hearing involved an Egyptian bank. The network also
reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had led the case, which centered
on an informant’s tip that money had flowed through the bank to help fund
Trump’s campaign.
CNN also reported that, in the end stages of the probe,
some prosecutors proposed subpoenaing Trump’s financial records, before
“top officials” ultimately concluded that the case had reached a dead-end.
At the time, Trump spokesman Jason
Miller rejected the allegation of money flowing to the campaign, saying:
“President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”
The Post investigation reveals
that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly
identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount
Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier.
A key theory
investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money
transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign
in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to
people familiar with the probe.
In pursuing the Egyptian intelligence and other lines of
investigation, Mueller’s team looked more deeply into Trump’s finances than has
been previously reported. The Post found that investigators obtained bank
records for some of the accounts Trump used most frequently when he was a candidate
for office, and that debate inside the Justice Department centered on whether
investigators could obtain additional records extending into the time Trump was
president.
Where some career investigators saw evidence that justified digging
deeper, Barr and Liu expressed doubts.
AG Barr did not order the case closed, according to multiple
people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and,
later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.
The full WaPo article continues from here
– long but worth your time to read it.
My 2 Cents: This
historical story and topic are critical to making sure that Trump never gets
Presidential power again – never, ever again.
On this issue regarding
the excellent Washington Post reporting legal charges cannot now be lodged
against Trump even though at the time (a few days before he officially became
president in January 2017) he cannot be charged now since the statue of
limitations expired in 2022.
Clever on his part as well as everyone connected
to it in the Barr DOJ. Shame on all of them for screwing America.
The only way to stop this
con man is ensure that he is NOT elected back into office by massive voter
turnout against him on November 5, 2024.
Hope you enjoyed the
article and info above on this very critical issue and as always thanks for
stopping by.
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