A recent investigation by The Washington Post, just before the election, has uncovered new details about a previously unknown federal investigation into whether Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi tried to channel $10 million into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
This investigation, kept under wraps for over three years, sought to determine whether a $10 million donation Trump made to his campaign shortly before the election was actually funded by the Egyptian government.
This is the same agency that ignored the Biden crime family.
The investigation started in 2017 after classified U.S. intelligence indicated that President Sisi intended to financially support Trump’s campaign. In early 2019, federal investigators discovered a substantial cash withdrawal from the National Bank of Egypt on January 15, 2017, just five days before Trump was inaugurated.
The withdrawal was made by an organization called the Research and Studies Center, which requested $9,998,000 in cash. Bank employees gathered the funds in $100 bills, packed them into two large bags, and four men later picked them up.
The investigation started during Trump’s presidency and included Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller’s team looked into several matters, including a covert legal battle to access records from the Egyptian bank, a case that eventually reached the Supreme Court.
As reported by The Washington Post:
The Post pieced together the court fight using records that were later released with redactions, other documents that remain secret, and interviews with people with knowledge of the case.
The legal fight, which led to the mysterious closing of part of the federal courthouse in D.C. in December of that year, wound its way to the Supreme Court as each side battled over whether the state-owned foreign bank could be compelled to produce evidence for a domestic U.S. criminal probe.
In its final plea to the high court to hear the case, the bank warned that if it had to turn over records, it would “wreak havoc on American foreign policy — possibly alienating U.S. allies, undermining diplomatic efforts and inviting reciprocal treatment.”
The high court denied the bank’s request, but still the bank did not comply. By mid-January 2019, the bank had begun accruing contempt fines of $50,000 a day imposed by Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court, for failing to turn over the records.
By early February 2019, the bank relented and delivered almost 1,000 pages, including versions of bank documents in Arabic and English.
Those bank records contained one especially tantalizing item: a short handwritten letter dated Jan. 15, 2017, in which an organization called the Research and Studies Center asked that the bank “kindly withdraw a sum of US $9,998,000” from its Heliopolis branch, located about seven miles from Cairo International Airport.
According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.
Mueller’s team gathered prosecutors and agents to brief them on the newly obtained documents. To people in the room, the withdrawal seemed to bolster the classified intelligence and validate the decision to have had Mueller’s team investigate, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Although investigators obtained nearly 1,000 documents from the bank, they couldn’t definitively identify the source of the funds. This lack of conclusive evidence led to a deadlock, and U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin eventually closed the case.
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign dismissed the allegations as “Fake News” and blamed “Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors.”
“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung told WaPo.
“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,” he added.
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