Did you know that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign may have received $10 million from Egypt days before the 2016 election? Federal law prohibits U.S. candidates from taking foreign donations.
If you’re not a regular (and thorough) Washington Post reader, probably not.
MediaMatters research shows that ABC, CBS and NBC, as well as the LA Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal each passed on the story, which broke on August 2nd.
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…
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…
classified U.S. intelligence [had indicated] that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign…
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” …
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…
“… it was very clear that there was so much smoke and now more smoke — there must be a fire.”
Coincidentally, Trump moved $10 million from his own bank accounts at the tail end of his campaign.
Trump’s own Department of Justice dilly dallied, hesitated and rejected investigator requests.
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…
In the years since the Egypt case was closed, the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), 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…
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.
And the William Barr measure of success:
“On Jan. 15, 2022, five years after the money left the bank in Cairo, the deadline for bringing charges under the federal statute of limitations for illegal campaign contributions expired.”
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