$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt
Political appointees rejected efforts to search for additional evidence investigators believed might provide answers, then closed the case.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump meets with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, right, in New York on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before that year's election. (Andres Kudacki/AP)
By Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig
August 2, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
This story is based partly on research that Davis and Leonnig conducted for their forthcoming book about the Justice Department. The two previously reported on how the agency resisted for more than a year before investigating Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack.
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.
Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.
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Team 10
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III organized a team of investigators dubbed Team 10, as in $10 million from Egypt. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
One official called it “jaw dropping.” In early 2017, Justice Department officials were briefed on initial reports from the Central Intelligence Agency that Sisi had sought to send money to Trump.
The intelligence had come partly from a confidential informant who had previously provided useful information, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence the CIA gathered in other operations corroborated parts of the individual’s account, The Post learned.
Justice officials sent the case to Mueller, who had been appointed in May to investigate alleged links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, based on the theory that the Egypt allegations dovetailed with possible foreign election interference. Federal election law bans foreign nationals and governments from making contributions or donations or providing any other direct or indirect financial support to candidates for political office in the United States.
Mueller organized his investigators into teams with intentionally bland code names, like Team R for Russia. The team investigating Egypt was dubbed Team 10, as in $10 million, people familiar with the investigation said.
By the early summer of 2017, prosecutors and FBI agents began sizing up the sensitive intelligence, taking stock of publicly available information and pursuing other leads.
They noticed that on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, then-candidate Trump had met with Sisi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The campaign’s account of the closed-door meeting gave no indication that Trump had held the Egyptian leader at arm’s length, as U.S. officials typically had done since Sisi seized power in a military coup three years earlier and swept aside the country’s first democratically elected president. After the meeting, the campaign said Trump had told Sisi the United States would be a “loyal friend” to Egypt if he was elected president, and on Fox News, Trump praised him as a “fantastic guy.”
Investigators also viewed it as potentially meaningful that, after he assumed office, Trump quickly embraced Sisi, the people said. Breaking with U.S. policy under President Barack Obama, Trump invited the Egyptian leader to be one of his first guests at the White House and met with him again, among other Arab leaders, on his first trip abroad.
As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion. In the context of the Egypt intelligence, investigators considered the amount a point of interest, people familiar with the probe said. Though the infusion was recorded in campaign finance reports as a contribution, Trump’s campaign finance chairman had structured the transaction as a loan that could be repaid to Trump to persuade him to approve the deal, according to FBI interview notes of a key Trump adviser.
Team 10 began looking for signs of the alleged transfer of the same amount — searching for evidence of the money either leaving Egypt or arriving with Trump.
By early 2018, according to previously unreported documents reviewed by The Post, investigators had obtained records from a handful of Trump’s most heavily used bank accounts and analyzed large transfers between May and November 2016 — from before the Trump-Sisi meeting in New York until after Trump wired money to his campaign.
It was a narrower window of time than investigators wanted to scrutinize, according to people familiar with internal discussions, but Mueller generally insisted on keeping the investigation as narrow as possible and not veering into Trump’s finances after he became president.
The bank records offered no evidence that Trump had taken money from Egypt, according to documents reviewed by The Post.
In analyzing the records, investigators focused on two real estate transactions that brought Trump large sums in the fall of 2016, the documents showed. One of those was the refinancing of a Las Vegas property, which the New York Times later pointed to as a possible source of the $10 million infusion to his campaign. Agents concluded both were irrelevant to the Egypt investigation, according to people briefed on the case.
Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment on behalf of the former special counsel’s office.
In July 2018, Mueller’s team subpoenaed the National Bank of Egypt. The government was searching for transactions of approximately $10 million, according to people familiar with the investigation. The demand sparked a secret court battle that would consume Team 10 for the remainder of the Mueller probe.
The attorneys who represented the bank in the subpoena fight did not respond to messages seeking comment. The bank did not respond to detailed questions. 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.
“It wasn’t a smoking gun,” one of those people said, describing the thinking at the time. “But it was very clear that there was so much smoke and now more smoke — there must be a fire.”
Mueller, meanwhile, had been moving to close down his operation, having nearly completed his probe of alleged Russian interference. By early 2019, he had asked other federal prosecutors’ offices to take over his team’s unfinished investigations.
The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., led by Liu, took on the Egypt probe.
Liu was well regarded among the lawyers in her office. She was a Republican who had risen through the ranks of the Justice and Treasury departments over a decade, but she later ran into headwinds with pro-Trump conservatives who would on two occasions successfully oppose her nomination for more senior positions in the government. Nearly two years into the job, Liu was being asked to oversee an investigation involving the president who had appointed her.
‘Important customer’
Jessie Liu, then the U.S. attorney for D.C., took over the Egypt probe in 2019 and was in the position of overseeing an investigation involving the president who had appointed her. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Liu’s office took an aggressive approach at first.
Her prosecutors partnered during the handoff with Mueller’s team in pressuring the National Bank of Egypt to release records — asking the judge to increase the contempt fine to $300,000 a day.
Her prosecutors also pushed the bank to disclose more about the Research and Studies Center. The center had virtually no public profile, and U.S. authorities suspected it was a front for the General Intelligence Service, Egypt’s equivalent of the CIA, according to people with knowledge of the case.
Prosecutors argued in court that the state-run Egyptian bank must be withholding details about the withdrawal. They said that the bank had not turned over a single email about the enormous same-day transaction and that the lack of any such internal communication was unthinkable.
“It strains credulity that the Bank kept such a stockpile of U.S. dollars on hand, let alone that it was able to gather it up all in less than 24 hours,” read a March 21, 2019, filing signed by Liu.
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In the back-and-forth arguments in court, the bank on April 4, 2019, filed a statement from a bank manager confirming the investigators’ suspicion that the Research and Studies Center had a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency,” according to an English translation of the statement. Further, he wrote, the intelligence agency was “another important customer of the Heliopolis Branch.”
Since seizing the presidency in 2013, Sisi has greatly expanded the powers of the GIS and increasingly relied on the spy agency to maintain his political stronghold at home as well as to press his agenda abroad. In 2018, his eldest son became the service’s deputy director.
Top leaders of the GIS figured prominently in the trial that led last month to the conviction of Menendez on charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and acting as an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government.
According to people with knowledge of the Trump probe, investigators believed that only Sisi or a government operative acting on his orders could have arranged for the $10 million cash withdrawal. They also saw hallmarks of an international money-laundering operation in the way funds moved into and through the Research and Studies Center accounts ahead of that cash withdrawal, indications of a potential crime that may or may not have been related to an effort to help Trump.
Investigators tried to connect the dots before the dramatic withdrawal involving bags of cash. They noticed that separate transactions in China and Egypt over a 14-month period suggested a possible path for the $10 million.
The Research and Studies Center opened an account at the bank’s Heliopolis branch in November 2015, the bank’s records showed. In August 2016, the center opened a second account, this time in the bank’s Shanghai branch. Five days after that, a company that investigators believed was tied to an Egyptian oligarch initiated a transfer of $10 million into the center’s Shanghai account, records showed.
The transfer was held up, then cleared for deposit in Shanghai in December, the records showed. The same amount was transferred from that account to the center’s account at the Heliopolis branch shortly before the cash withdrawal there on Jan. 15, 2017.
Three days later, the center closed its account in Shanghai. Within 90 days, its account in Heliopolis was closed, too.
The Post could not determine whether the Research and Studies Center still exists. A corporate registration number listed in a 2019 bank record does not appear in searches of a government website or on a commercial database of Egyptian businesses.
For U.S. authorities, in the spring of 2019, that was where the money trail went cold...
‘Adult supervision’
In April 2019, the FBI agents and federal prosecutors proposed a plan to drill deeper, people familiar with the investigation said.
They eyed a range of investigative targets in Egypt, such as seeking additional bank records and witness interviews. But in the FBI agents’ view, the people said, there was little reason to take those steps unless they could act on the most important part of their plan: looking at a wider set of Trump’s banking records.
And that part of the plan proved the most contentious.
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Investigators pressed their case with Liu. They argued that Mueller had not authorized his agents to obtain records later than November of that year. In light of the newly obtained cash withdrawal records from early 2017, the investigators argued that they needed to see what had landed in Trump’s accounts after that 2017 Cairo withdrawal, according to the notes and people familiar with the case.
Finally, in June, agents seemed to have a breakthrough in a meeting with Liu. According to the notes, senior officials from the FBI’s Washington field office told her that bureau leaders supported the effort: “Full FBI chain briefed up — fully supportive of an investigation — specifically bank subpoena Trump.”
Liu indicated she was open to a subpoena seeking a limited amount of additional Trump bank records, according to the notes and two of the people. The agents were pleased, the people said. As she was leaving, she told the group she would need to run the matter by Barr.
It was a logical step to take in the Justice Department’s standard practice of handling major, politically sensitive cases; the attorney general would have to be briefed on any probe even tangentially touching the sitting president. But investigators worried Barr might halt the effort in its tracks, two of the people said.
...The case was sensitive, Barr told her, and she needed to reach her own conclusions about the merits of further investigative steps, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Liu reviewed the intelligence and visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to discuss the basis for it, those people and others said. The CIA declined to respond to a detailed list of questions sent by The Post.
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.
Liu was concerned, according to two people familiar with her thinking, that the investigators’ push for additional Trump bank records could come off as a fishing expedition. She was not won over by the new records of the 2017 withdrawal, according to the people. Egypt’s intelligence agency might make enormous cash withdrawals for any number of reasons, she cautioned, not necessarily to donate to an American president.
Liu also expressed concern that Mueller’s Egypt investigators had obtained and scrutinized numerous Trump bank records for 2016 without finding anything, and now they were asking to look for even more records from 2017.
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.
Privately, Liu told some supervisors in her office that with Trump having announced his bid for a second term, the focus on a sitting president’s finances made this case different, people with knowledge of the matter said. Although investigators argued that pursuing bank records would be entirely covert, Liu said she worried the Justice Department could be accused — once again — of interfering in a presidential election.
CIA officials had also relayed to Liu concerns that apart from Trump’s bank records, other steps investigators wanted to take could jeopardize their operations, according to people familiar with the discussions.
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Barr told Wray he had a problem: Liu seemed uncomfortable making key decisions in the case. Barr said she doubted that some investigative moves were justified but felt pressured by the agents. Barr said Liu worried that blocking some investigative steps might be perceived by the team as quashing a politically explosive investigation, the two people said.
Barr also told Wray he was suspicious of FBI agents on the case, as some had worked on the Mueller investigation, which he had criticized as largely unwarranted. Barr said that he wanted to be sure the director was aware of the situation and that he was applying some “adult supervision” to his FBI agents.
Barr stressed to Wray that the matter would come under intense scrutiny no matter what happened with the case, the people said. He warned that given the controversy surrounding the Russia investigation, and given that this new case also centered on the sitting president, they could not risk short-circuiting or rushing any investigative decisions. He said investigators needed to ensure that an appropriate legal basis, or predicate, existed before proceeding, they said.
Sometime around September 2019, FBI agents and a supervisor from the field office presented what they considered an ultimatum to Liu: authorize getting Trump’s 2017 bank records or it wasn’t worth continuing to investigate, according to people later briefed on the exchange. Liu listened but turned them down; she said she wasn’t closing the case and was open to subpoenaing Trump’s records later on if agents turned up more compelling evidence to justify doing so, these people said.
Case closed
By late 2019, Liu’s office was poised to make sentencing recommendations for high-profile senior Trump advisers it had prosecuted, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone — cases that could tarnish Trump and his campaign. That December, the White House nominated Liu to be an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department.
Barr seized the moment to make a change. Breaking with the tradition of allowing White House nominees to remain in their current posts until confirmed for new ones, he ordered Liu in early January 2020 to step down by the end of the month, people with knowledge of the matter said. The White House later withdrew Liu’s nomination.
Barr installed a longtime ally, Timothy Shea, who was then serving as a counselor to Barr and had previously worked with him in the George H.W. Bush administration. At one of Shea’s first meetings, the office’s senior leadership briefed him on major pending cases and outlined the Egypt probe and their proposed subpoenas for Trump bank and foreign bank records. Shea told them he was putting a hold on any investigative steps while he got up to speed, people with knowledge of Shea’s instruction said.
After the meeting, investigators discussed their feeling that Shea’s reaction to the Egypt case was so negative that it spelled the end of any forward movement, the people said; they did not return to press Shea for those subpoenas.
Barr, however, grew disappointed with his handpicked chief prosecutor for a separate reason, according to people familiar with Barr’s thinking. Shea allowed attorneys in his office to recommend a lengthy prison sentence for Stone, who had been convicted of multiple felonies.
Less than four months after appointing him, Barr replaced Shea with Sherwin, a former Navy intelligence officer who spent a decade prosecuting counterintelligence and terrorism cases before becoming an adviser to Barr.
In a meeting the first week of June, senior leadership once again reviewed major pending cases with the new acting U.S. attorney, people familiar with the case said. Sherwin listened to the status update on the Egypt probe. Prosecutors had not been able to gather any new information for months, but they argued to Sherwin that there were still steps in the case they could pursue.
Sherwin told the team the lack of evidence meant that the case should be shut down. With some resigned to that outcome, no one spoke up to object, people familiar with the discussion told The Post.
On June 7, he sent an email to the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The subject line of the email, which was reviewed by The Post, read: “Egypt Investigation.”
“Based upon review of this investigation,” Sherwin began, his office would be “closing the above matter” because neither an indictment nor a conviction was likely.
In an interview with The Post, Sherwin said Biden administration appointees, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, who took over the department months later, could have relaunched the probe if they disagreed. “The case was closed without prejudice,” he said. “Anyone could have reopened the case the second I left that office.”
The case was not reopened.
Incoming Biden administration Justice Department leaders and prosecutors in the D.C. office were immediately consumed with cases from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the largest investigation in the department’s history.
Garland, senior members of his team, and Biden’s new U.S. attorney in D.C. were never briefed on the Egypt investigation in their first year in office, one former and one current government official told The Post.
The Justice Department did not make Garland available for comment.
On Jan. 15, 2022, five years after the money left the bank in Cairo, the deadline for bringing charges under the federal statute of limitations for illegal campaign contributions expired.
Cate Brown, Alice Crites and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... stigation/
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