Report reveals Egypt may have bribed Trump with $10m, but probe was derailed

Egypt’s government may have given Donald Trump $10 million in cash in 2017 to boost his election campaign, but the probe into the bribe was quashed by Trump’s attorney general, William Bar, a damning report by the Washington Post reveals.

The report, published on Friday, states that a $10m cash withdrawal was made from a Cairo bank just five days before Trump’s inauguration, which later fuelled a probe into whether he had accepted the bribe.

In the US, candidates for federal office are prohibited from accepting foreign donations, which would make the withdrawal unlawful. The report also states that Trump had in October 2016 injected $10m into his campaign, which came following a meeting with Egypt’s president when he was in New York.

However, the official investigation was thwarted before agents were able to collect evidence they needed for the case, after Trump’s attorney general William Barr reportedly questioned if there was sufficient evidence to carry out the probe.

Trump’s Justice Department also blocked FBI agents and prosecutors from accessing bank records which would have provided the evidence.

Barr had also told attorney Jessie Liu, also appointed by Trump, to examine the intelligence herself.

The report has raised questions over Trump’s repeated paise for Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his objections over concerns from politicians over his authoritarian rule and human rights abuses in the north African country.

Two months before the election day, Trump met with Sisi behind closed doors on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in Manhattan, with the Trump later calling him a "fantastic guy" in an interview on Fox News.

Directly after the meeting, the Trump campaign also said that Trump promised Sisi that the US planned to be a "loyal friend" to Egypt.  

The probe has not been renewed under attorney general Merrick Garland, and is not likely to be reopened.

The justice department, US attorney in Washington DC, the FBI and an Egyptian government spokesperson declined to answer the Washington Post’s questions.

An unnamed source told the Washington Post that "every American should be concerned about how this case ended” and that "the Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads – it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not."

A spokesperson for Trump has slammed the report, blaming "deep state Trump-haters and bad faith actors" for it.

"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," Steven Cheung said.