From a Washington Post report by Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis
Five days before Trump became president in 2017, a bank manager in Cairo received a letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence agency, asking for a $10 million cash withdrawl from the agency’s account.
Bundles of $100 bills were stuffed into two large bags. Two men later arrived and carried out 200 pounds of cash, a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.
When U.S. investigators learned of the cash withdrawal in early 2019, the discovery appeared to be a smoking gun in an earlier criminal investigation that indicated Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign.
It was coincidentally the same amount of money that Trump injected into the final days of his campaign with his own money.
Investigators 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.”
After Trump assumed office, Sisi was one of his first guests at the White House, and met with him again, along with other Arab leaders, on his first trip abroad.
Within months of the discovery, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence. By the fall of 2019, the investigation was grinding down.
Trump’s appointed Attorney General Bill Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. 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.
It has been unknown to the public that during the time of Bob Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, DOJ officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from the government of another foreign country — Egypt.
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 released $195 million in military aid that the United States had been withholding over human rights abuses, and was followed up by an additional $1.2 billion.
