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Did a potential $10 million cash payment from Egypt’s authoritarian ruler, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, have anything to do with Donald Trump’s affection for him?
That was the crux of a now-closed federal probe launched in 2016, new details of which were published Friday in an investigation by The Washington Post.
The Post connected the dots from a $9,998,000 withdrawal from a Cairo bank five days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 to a seeming front for Egyptian intelligence, fueling an investigation into whether the former president had taken money from El-Sisi for his presidential campaign.
But the official investigation was derailed by Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, before agents were able to get all the evidence they needed to bring a case, according to the Post, which the paper’s sources said will likely never be reopened — leaving aside the fact that the statute of limitations on prosecuting the case, which would have been charges as a campaign finance violation, expired in 2022.
The $100 bills spirited out of the bank weighed nearly 200 pounds in total and required four men to cart it all away, the Post report said. The CIA had received intelligence that El-Sisi had been looking to give Trump’s presidential campaign a $10 million cash infusion as the election neared, and investigators were chasing down a raft of solid leads.
For example, two months prior to Election Day, Trump met with El-Sisi behind closed doors on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in Manhattan, itself a break with recent US tradition. After the meeting, the Trump campaign immediately announced that Trump promised El-Sisi that the US planned to be a “loyal friend” to Egypt, and called him a “fantastic guy” in an appearance on Fox News. Trump also made sure El-Sisi was invited to the White House, something Barack Obama, Trump’s predecessor, did not do.
Investigators working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller drilled down into Trump’s behavior at crucial times, and saw that when candidate Trump first met with El-Sisi in 2016, his campaign had been low on funds. Yet, Trump rebuffed pleas from his most trusted advisers, who begged him to gift his campaign enough money to pay for a final run of TV commercials going into Election Day. Then, on Oct. 28, 2016, some five weeks after meeting with El-Sisi, Trump announced he was writing a $10 million check to his campaign.
Agents and prosecutors didn’t yet have a smoking gun, but they felt they were getting closer and closer and it was simply a matter of time and getting proper access to Trump’s bank records. Still, by early 2019, Mueller’s investigation into Russian campaign interference was coming to a close, and he handed off his ancillary cases to other Justice Department prosecutors to bring in for eventual landings.
The case first went to Jessie Liu, the head federal prosecutor in DC, and a Trump appointee. When she was later nominated to be an assistant Treasury secretary, Barr ordered her to step down, after which the White House would later withdraw her nomination. In Liu’s place, Barr appointed Timothy Shea, someone the Post describes as a “longtime ally,” then got rid of Shea for unrelated reasons and brought in Michael Sherwin, a former adviser to Barr. On June 7, 2020, Sherwin shut down the Trump investigation for “lack of evidence.”
“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” an unnamed source told the Post. “The Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads — it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not.”
The Trump campaign called the Post story “textbook fake news.”
“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said. “None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact.”
In the past, Trump has heaped praise on various dictators — including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.
But, as Trump himself reportedly said at the 2019 G-7 summit, El-Sisi, was his “favorite dictator.”
That April, in response to questions from reporters about Sisi’s efforts to remain in power for at least 15 more years, Trump replied, “I think he’s doing a great job. I can just tell you he is doing a great job. Great president.”
Trump’s official actions also appeared to be those of an admirer: A year earlier, Trump casually undid a US government hold on $195 million in military aid to Egypt that had been frozen over human rights abuses under El-Sisi, then topped it up a little while later with $1.2 billion more.
Asked if he backed the efforts to allow Sisi to potentially stay in power for 15 more years, Trump told reporters: “I think he’s doing a great job. I don’t know about the effort, I can just tell you he is doing a great job ... great president.”
