Did Egypt Give Trump a $10 Million Bribe? The FBI Was Investigating, Then AG Barr Closed Case

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to a major investigation by The Washington Post into Donald Trump’s relationship with the Egyptian government, which reportedly tried to funnel $10 million in cash to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The cash weighed about 200 pounds when it was withdrawn from a state-run bank in Cairo at the request of an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service, just five days before Trump took office as president in 2017. The Post reports Trump earlier gave the same amount to his own campaign, and investigators suspected Trump expected to be repaid by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But questions about the transaction went unanswered by the Justice Department under Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, who closed the case, citing, quote, “a lack of sufficient evidence” — a decision one DOJ official called “jaw-dropping.”

For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by one of the reporters who broke this story. Carol Leonnig is the national investigative reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on White House and government accountability. Her new piece is headlined “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.”

Carol, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you start off with how you began this story in The Washington Post?

CAROL LEONNIG: My colleague Aaron Davis and I began this work while we were doing research for a book about the Justice Department under Donald Trump and under President Biden. In that research, we discovered far more details than we expected about an incredibly secretive probe. This probe began in early 2017 with what investigators at the Department of Justice called “jaw-dropping intelligence.”

The CIA alerted the Department of Justice days after Donald Trump was elected that they had what they considered pretty reliable information from an informant indicating that the president of Egypt planned or wanted to or ordered $10 million injected into Donald Trump’s — then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to help him get reelected. That would be illegal, and hiding that money would be money laundering. And if Donald Trump had taken that money, it would potentially be bribery and compromise of a sitting president by a foreign government.

DOJ investigators saw this as extremely disturbing and worrisome and eventually alerted top officials at the department who decided that Robert Mueller should take on the investigation. He had just newly been appointed in May of 2017 and was looking into foreign interference by Russia in the 2016 election, and now they wanted him to also look at this secret matter. Nothing about this was ever known to the public at the time.

What happened next, in the next phase, was that Mueller’s team, almost as they are shutting down their office in 2019, finally win a lengthy appeals court battle, a secret one, that closed down the federal courthouse in D.C. to sort of conceal the nature of the debate inside the hearing room. They obtain a record that seems to corroborate the intelligence. It shows that there was a $10 million cash withdrawal, very mysterious, people walking out of a bank branch near the Cairo airport with a large portion of all the U.S. bills then in the entire Egyptian banking system in duffel bags. No one signs for it. It comes out of a spy-linked account. And the reason this was so important, Amy, was, obviously, $10 million in cash walking out of a bank is a big deal, but it came out of the account linked to Egypt’s spy agency, essentially Egypt’s CIA. And that is what the original intelligence suggested, that el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, wanted to use his spy agency to get the money to Trump.

So, these things were lining up, but Mueller is leaving the building. He is now closing shop in early 2019 and hands off this investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. The boss of this investigation ultimately is the new attorney general, Bill Barr. It’s run by the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu, who tells her investigators, “This is pretty impressive stuff,” but she wants to brief Barr on the matter. An investigation of a sitting president has to be briefed to the attorney general. But she returns from meeting with him and reviewing the evidence at the CIA with a different posture. Investigators feel that she’s done a 180. She was supportive of them continuing this investigation, and now she is telling them she doesn’t want to approve their subpoena for Trump’s bank records. These records were key, in their view, to determine: Did the money from Cairo that was mysteriously withdrawn five days before Donald Trump was elected, did it somehow return in some form to any of Donald Trump’s personal or campaign accounts? And they were blocked from doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Carol Leonnig, talk about the meeting that at-the-time presidential candidate Donald Trump had with Sisi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly that took place in the fall, months before President Trump took office.

CAROL LEONNIG: Yes. This meeting was very interesting to investigators later. And here are the two reasons why. Donald Trump was trying to burnish his foreign policy credentials and bona fides. He didn’t have a lot of experience in government, as he has already acknowledged himself, and so he wanted to show that he could make deals with foreign governments and foreign leaders, he could establish important relationships.

He meets with el-Sisi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, which is held each year, and it’s September 20th, 2016. At that time, Donald Trump’s campaign was cash-starved. He was running out of money, and his advisers were trying to convince him to cut a check from his own accounts to help fund the last little bit of media buys that the campaign needed to purchase in order to stay, you know, vibrant and alive in the race. And he did not want to put any more of his own money in the campaign, because he thought he was going to lose. But after he meets el-Sisi — and he does this privately, Amy; some of it’s public, but some of the meeting is just him, el-Sisi and an interpreter from Egypt. And investigators found that very curious, because then, on October 28th, a month later, Donald Trump does agree to write a check to his own campaign, after much, much pleading from his advisers. Investigators saw this as an important moment: why, if Donald Trump had been absolutely insisting he wouldn’t donate to his campaign anymore, he finally did.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Carol Leonnig, you write in the piece — this would be an answer to the question: Well, why would Sisi want to have sway over President Trump? You write, “Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he was called ‘my favorite dictator.’ In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid … the [U.S.] 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.” Carol Leonnig?

CAROL LEONNIG: You know, Donald Trump really flipped the switch on U.S. policy towards Egypt. You may and your listeners may know that el-Sisi was viewed by the United States as both an ally, but a worrisome ally. Egypt is very important to the United States’ position in the Middle East, but el-Sisi had risen to power through a violent coup, a military coup. And in the wake of his rise to power, it became known that he was suspected to have played a key role in the military killing of supporters of his opponent, who had been democratically elected. He was also viewed as very comfortable with a host of human rights abuses against opponents and critics in his country and trying to violently shut down that opposition, using military and spy power to do that. So the United States viewed him with a little bit of remove and had put a hold on this very valuable military aid and had asked him and pressed him numerous times to do better on human rights at home.

But when Donald Trump got into office, he didn’t have any of those restrictions. He insisted that one of his first officials that he was going to meet as president was el-Sisi, something his own advisers encouraged him not to do, because that was showing too much support to the Egyptian president. Rex Tillerson, his then-secretary of state, counseled Trump not to release this military aid, that it would be too generous, and el-Sisi had done nothing to improve his record on democracy and free and fair elections and human rights record. Nothing. And so, Trump fired Tillerson and ordered the release of this aid.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Carol, “In the years since the Egypt case was closed,” you write, “the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of [New Jersey Democratic] Sen. Bob Menendez, the former [chair] of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” Can you draw that line, a man who was about to be sentenced in October, just before the election?

CAROL LEONNIG: Well, the key thing to know here is there was a very full and expansive investigation, with no holds barred, to figure out: Was Senator Menendez a foreign agent of the Egyptian government? There were records searched, encrypted signals, communications gathered, and what they found was he was. He was receiving money from an Egyptian national who was doing the bidding of Egyptian spy and military leaders, and ultimately from the Sisi regime. He was giving information to the Egyptian officials at high levels, including information that was deemed secret by our U.S. government, about our U.S. personnel in the Egyptian Embassy.

And what is also, to me, really striking, Amy, is el-Sisi has relied on his Egyptian version of the CIA, called the General Intelligence Service, to push his agenda abroad in the United States and to tamp down criticism at home. And here, the General Intelligence Service was a critical feature of reaching out to and intervening and directing Senator Menendez. And it was the General Intelligence Service accounts from which the $10 million in the Donald Trump investigation had been withdrawn five days before Donald Trump was elected. The same agency, the same government account was, according to the intelligence, at work trying to find a way to get money to Donald Trump. But that investigation was not allowed to proceed.

AMY GOODMAN: Carol Leonnig, we just have 20 seconds. Could this bribery investigation into Donald Trump be reopened?

CAROL LEONNIG: The information could be gathered. There could be an investigation that looked more deeply and looked at the actual records the original investigators wanted to. But the chances for prosecuting anyone who played a role in this and committed a crime are extremely low. The statute of limitations is over, and it’s unlikely that that could change.

AMY GOODMAN: Carol Leonnig, national investigative reporter for The Washington Post. We’ll link to your exclusive report, written with Aaron Davis, “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.”

Next up, we speak with a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. She lost her sister on 9/11. And we’ll talk about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to revoke a plea deal by three prisoners still at Guantánamo. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Sold American” by Kinky Friedman, who died in June at the age of 79. In addition to being a musician and writer, Kinky was an independent candidate for Texas governor in 2006.