A spokesperson for Donald Trump blamed “Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors” for a bombshell report on Friday about a secret criminal investigation into whether Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the authoritarian ruler of Egypt, sought to give the former president $10m during his victorious 2016 White House run.
“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” Steven Cheung told the Washington Post, which published the report on Friday.
“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.”
The deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent, shadow government of agents, operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart Trump. One of the theory’s chief propagators, Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”. Nonetheless, it remains popular on the US right and among Trump’s aides.
Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016. According to the Post, five days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, an organisation linked to Egyptian intelligence services withdrew $10m from a Cairo bank.
“Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt,” the Post said, “employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags.”
Four men “carried away the bags, which US 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 US currency”.
According to the Post, US federal investigators learned of the withdrawal in 2019, by which time they had spent two years investigating CIA intelligence that indicated Sisi sought to give Trump $10m.
Such a contribution would potentially have violated federal law regarding foreign donations.
This year, in a New York state case concerning hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, Trump was convicted on 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records.
According to the Post, US investigators who discovered the $10m Cairo withdrawal “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 $10m of his own money”.
Eight years on, with Trump running for president again, the Post report landed in the aftermath of the bribery conviction of Robert Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey who took gold bars and cash from Egyptian sources.
Menendez faces a maximum sentence of 222 years.
While in office, Trump repeatedly praised Sisi, over objections from US politicians concerned about the Egyptian’s authoritarian rule.
As described by the Post, the US investigation which uncovered the Cairo withdrawal was questioned by William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general. Ultimately, a prosecutor appointed by Barr closed the inquiry without criminal charges being filed.
Later, as the 2020 election approached, CNN reported that a mysterious DC courthouse hearing in 2018 – involving prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election – concerned an Egyptian bank.
A Trump spokesperson, Jason Miller, said then: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”
On Friday, Cheung, Trump’s current spokesperson, called the Post report “textbook fake news”.
The justice department, the US attorney in Washington DC and the FBI declined to answer questions, the Post said.
The prosecutor who closed the case, Michael Sherwin, said he stood by his decision.
An Egyptian government spokesperson declined to answer the Post’s questions.
An anonymous government source told the Post: “Every American should be concerned about how this case ended. 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.”
