On Friday, the Washington Post broke a bombshell story about a credible allegation of bribery involving the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Egypt’s dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and a mysterious $10 million all-cash withdrawal from an Egyptian state-run bank just five days before Trump became president — and adopted a more friendly aid policy toward the Middle Eastern nation.
The rumors of such an investigation have kicked around for years — most famously in the latter days of Trump’s term when part of a federal courthouse was closed off while prosecutors pushed for records from the Egyptian bank, although few details were known at the time. The new Post investigation revealed a stunning detail — that the Cairo bank had received a note from an agency believed to be Egyptian intelligence to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million in two, 100-pound bags full of U.S. $100 bills, five days before Trump became 45th president.
The case, which kicked off with a tip from a credible U.S. intelligence asset of a $10 million bribe from the Sisi regime to Trump to pay for a last-minute ad blitz in the 2016 campaign, remains a circumstantial one, lacking the smoking gun that could lie in Trump’s unexamined bank records. But what remarkable circumstances these are.
We know that Trump — reluctantly, at the urging of aides — did inject $10 million into his campaign in its final days. The Post said a Trump campaign official later told the FBI the money was structured as a loan which could be repaid to Trump. We now know about the Egyptian withdrawal of nearly $10 million in American cash, in line with the intelligence tip. And we know that Trump cozied up to Sisi — largely a U.S. pariah during the Obama administration — and even called him “my favorite dictator” before releasing nearly $1.4 billion in military aid to Egypt that had been held up because of its human-rights abuses.
The missing link in the probe was Trump’s bank records that might have shown receipt of $10 million. But, as the Post chronicled in great detail, the case was handed off in 2019 from the former special counsel, Robert Mueller, who’d chased the tip aggressively, to political appointees in then-Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department, including Barr himself. The Trump appointees refused to go after Trump’s bank records from 2017 as he became president — even after the evidence of the Egyptian withdrawal that January. And President Joe Biden’s AG Merrick Garland, whose tenure has been marked by his political cowardice, didn’t restart the case before the statute of limitations expired in January 2022.
In many ways, the failed bribery probe is not an isolated incident. This is the third major case — in addition to the allegations of a Trump cover-up in Mueller’s probe of 2016 Russian election interference, and the 2016 hush money to Stormy Daniels that eventually led to Trump’s conviction on 34 state felony counts — in which Barr is alleged to have put his finger on the scales of justice in a case involving the president who appointed him. That alone is worthy of a congressional investigation.
Yes it is.
The Justice Department has not interfered in the investigation of Hunter Biden who may very well end up doing time for a minor crime that is rarely prosecuted under the circumstances. And the DOJ prosecuted Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez who will almost certainly will go to jail for accepting bribes from …. Egypt! NO thumbs on the scale for their own. If anything, at least in the Hunter Biden case, it’s the opposite. He would almost certainly not have been prosecuted if he weren’t the son of the president. But Trump has gotten away with corruption on an unprecedented scale and there seems to be little appetite for even the Senate to take it up for transparency purposes. (We know he can’t be prosecuted for this, unfortunately, since the high court will almost certainly define this as part of his official duties.)
I suspect that everyone is just holding their breath hoping that Trump will lose and they’ll finally be rid of him without inciting the right wing again. But giving him a pass or delaying justice combined with the Supremes putting their thumbs on the scale has resulted in even more cynicism about the judicial system. The Democratic Senate has been completely asleep at the wheel.
Trump and his cronies have taken a wrecking ball to the rule of law and the Department of Justice and I’m not sure if or when it can be rebuilt. I’m afraid that the negative consequences of this era are profound and long lasting and I’m not sure that anyone’s going to even attempt to do anything about it.