Donald Trump Maybe Took Honking Bribe From Egypt? That's Not Like Him!
Donald Trump Maybe Took Honking Bribe From Egypt? That's Not Like Him!
When Donald went to Egypt-land ... "give me some fucking money."
Stop us if you have heard this one before, but former Attorney General and dour-faced garden gnome Bill Barr may have used his position to shut down an investigation into whether Donald Trump had illicit financial help from a foreign government in his 2016 campaign.
No, not that foreign government. We mean a whole different one that didn’t get thoroughly investigated thanks to resistance from Trumpists in the upper levels of the Justice Department.
The Washington Post has a new investigation into the allegations (gift link), which are that Donald Trump hit up Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi for a cash infusion to help his financially struggling campaign in the fall of 2016, and El-Sisi agreed. In return, Trump’s administration later released $195 million in military aid that the Obama administration had withheld from Egypt over concerns about its government’s human rights abuses and then another billion dollars for good measure. That’s what we in the biz call a hella ROI.
At this point, would it be easier to list the foreign nations that Donald Trump and his family haven’t illicitly hit up for money during their nine-years-and-counting run as the most grotesque American fauna to stumble out of our fetid swamps since the last Founding Father lifted his feathered quill from the parchment on which was written the Constitution to which he had just affixed his name?
The Post story is long, so let’s try to sum it up without causing your eyes to roll back into your heads.
In September of 2016, Trump had met with El-Sisi at the UN General Assembly. In a closed-door meeting, he reportedly told the Egyptian dictator that the US would be a “loyal friend” to Egypt, because Trump does love and admire his dictators.
PREVIOUSLY! FOR BACKGROUND!
The following month, Trump injected $10 million of his own money into his financially struggling campaign, which was a bit of a surprise because Trump is a cheap bastard who spent the entire election season claiming he was self-financing the campaign even as he was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.
Then in early 2017, the US received classified intelligence that El-Sisi, a man Trump once called “my favorite dictator,” had wanted to give Trump $10 million to help his campaign. Two years after that, the intelligence community learned about a suspicious bank withdrawal in Egypt from around that time:
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.
Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. 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.
Interesting timing! And an interesting amount!
American authorities thought this withdrawal might connect to their theory that Trump was okay with coughing up $10 million of his own money because he knew that El-Sisi was going to reimburse him. So prosecutors and FBI agents went searching for bank records they thought might have evidence that would show the money from the Egyptian bank withdrawal making its way to Trump.
Yr Wonkette would like to note the resemblance here to the infamous Stormy Daniels case, in which Michael Cohen fronted the payoff to Daniels and Trump paid him back through a series of fraudulent business transactions. Except this time it seems Trump may have fronted the payoff to himself, and then Sisi might have paid him back through a series of fraudulent business transactions.
And then — if Trump in fact received $10 million from Egypt, which is still unknown — Trump paid El-Sisi back for paying him back by reorienting American foreign policy to be more Egypt-friendly. Not unlike the scandal involving Egypt and Sen. Bob Menendez, who is resigning in a couple of weeks after being convicted of taking bribes from Egypt-linked officials.
Egyptians, man. First they renege on letting the Jews go, and now this.
The Trump investigation eventually wound up being overseen by the then-US Attorney for DC Jessie Liu, who was a well-respected lawyer. Unfortunately, she was also a well-respected lawyer who had to report to Bill Barr:
Afterward, and after conferring with Barr again, Liu expressed hesitancy to FBI agents and her deputies about the proposal to subpoena Trump’s bank records, according to people familiar with the case. It felt to some that she had made a 180-degree turn, these people said. […]
Frustrated investigators argued to Liu that in any other case — even with far less compelling evidence — they would have been able to obtain additional bank records “in a heartbeat,” according to one person who spoke to The Post.
Yep, nothing suspicious about any of this, except everything.
At that point, the case was still open, but stalled until investigators could turn up more information that might convince Liu to reverse her stance. But then Barr got rid of Liu while she was awaiting confirmation for a Treasury job and replaced her with a series of loyalists who eventually closed the investigation.
Of course everyone is denying everything, and Trump spokeshomunculus Steven Cheung accused the Post of being “played for suckers by Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors peddling hoaxes and shams.”
The Post also ends by noting that even if a future Kamala Harris administration wanted to reopen the investigation, we are well past the five-year statute of limitations on the case, which started when the money left the bank in Cairo in January of 2017. Trump might spend the rest of his miserable life fighting various criminal charges if he loses in November, but influence-peddling to an Egyptian dictator will sadly not be one of them.
Please help keep Wonkette going, at least until Abdel El-Sisi finally returns our calls.
A five year statue of limitations for something like this is way too short. And Bill Barr needs to investigating for interfering with a criminal investigation.
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you." - John Brennan, former CIA director on Trump.