A blockbuster report from The Washington Post lays out the very, very, very damning evidence that, near the end of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he wasn’t just illegally covering up payments to porn star paramour Stormy Daniels, but on the verge of getting illegal millions from the Egypt government. After a long DOJ investigation, Trump Attorney General Bill Barr was instrumental in getting it shut down.
The Post did an amazing job digging into the long, complicated details of this story. I highly recommend reading the entire article, if you can first check your outrage. Despite the incriminating evidence, the statute of limitations has now passed.
The Post report begins with an overview:
Five days before Donald 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 Justice Department 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.
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Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department 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-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.
Special prosecutor Robert Mueller, in charge of the Russia investigation, was in charge of this investigation, too, for a while.
Trump was never charged, much less convicted over this. So, the allegations are no more than just that. But to paraphrase one of The Post’s sources, there was so much smoke it’s impossible to believe there wasn’t a fire.
Here’s some of the heaviest smoke from The Post:
[Prosecutors and FBI agents] noticed that on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, then-candidate Trump had met with Sisi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The campaign’s account of the closed-door meeting gave no indication that Trump had held the Egyptian leader at arm’s length, as U.S. officials typically had done since Sisi seized power in a military coup three years earlier and swept aside the country’s first democratically elected president. After the meeting, the campaign said Trump had told Sisi the United States would be a “loyal friend” to Egypt if he was elected president, and on Fox News, Trump praised him as a “fantastic guy.”
Investigators also viewed it as potentially meaningful that, after he assumed office, Trump quickly embraced Sisi, the people said. Breaking with U.S. policy under President Barack Obama, Trump invited the Egyptian leader to be one of his first guests at the White House and met with him again, among other Arab leaders, on his first trip abroad.
As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion. In the context of the Egypt intelligence, investigators considered the amount a point of interest, people familiar with the probe said. Though the infusion was recorded in campaign finance reports as a contribution, Trump’s campaign finance chairman had structured the transaction as a loan that could be repaid to Trump to convince him to approve the deal, according to FBI interview notes of a key Trump adviser.
If this was an illegal campaign contribution, the statute of limitations expired on January 15, 2022, The Post article said. The Post also noted that current Attorney General Merrick Garland could have re-opened the case before then, though his office was busy with January 6th cases.
Since then, Donald Trump has had seven and a half more years as a national political figure. Much of that time, he has been a presidential candidate, too.
I am hopeful that a Kamala Harris administration will take a good look at where Trump has been getting money from and then proceed accordingly.
