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Friday, August 02, 2024 9:02:25 AM
Just more of criminal trump. Long but informative. Gifted.
$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt
https://wapo.st/3SxAkvO
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.
Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.
Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.
Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.
The behind-the-scenes drama played out during an especially tense time for the Justice Department, with Trump accusing the agency of pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russian election interference, his appointees seeking to rein in investigators they saw as partisan, and some career supervisors growing wary of plunging the agency into yet another legal battle with the president.
Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.
Then-Attorney General William P. Barr did not order the Egypt case closed, but his actions steered it to that end, according to multiple people briefed on the case. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In June of 2020, the prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the office leading the case closed the probe, citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That conclusion belied the months of internal disagreements over whether investigators had been allowed to go far enough in seeking that evidence.
“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal dissension. “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 spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign did not answer a list of questions from The Post, instead referring to this story as “textbook Fake News.”
“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said by email. “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.”
An Egyptian government spokesman declined to answer detailed questions sent by The Post. “It is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments” in other countries, wrote Ayman Walash, the director of the Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Center. In his email, Walash also emphasized that the Justice Department had closed the investigation without charges.
As he campaigns to return to the White House, Trump has cast himself as a victim of “deep state” plots that sought to undermine his presidency, often focusing his ire on the Russia probe that shadowed much of his time in office.
That investigation did not ultimately find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Moscow. But it did conclude his team expected the campaign would benefit from Russian interference. Unbeknownst to the public, during the same period, Justice Department officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from the government of another foreign country — Egypt.
In the years since the Egypt case was closed, the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.” In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United States 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.
The Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. declined to answer detailed questions for this report. The FBI declined to answer The Post’s questions or to make Wray available to comment. Barr also declined to answer detailed questions for this report, and Liu did not respond to a similar inquiry.
In an interview, Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated national security cases, said he had previously closed some where sufficient evidence never materialized. “I made the same decision here and I stand by it,” Sherwin said.
This exclusive account of the Egypt investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits. The Post also interviewed more than two dozen people with knowledge of the investigation. The individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive probe that ended without criminal charges. Some showed The Post emails, texts and other documents corroborating their accounts.
The investigation was shrouded in secrecy for the entirety of the more than three years the case was open, from 2017 to 2020. It surfaced obliquely in that time only once, when senior judges closed a part of the federal courthouse in D.C. to hide the identities of the parties in a hearing then described as involving a state-owned foreign corporation that was resisting a subpoena. Many observers assumed the corporation was Russian.
In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race, after the investigation had been closed, CNN revealed that the mysterious courthouse hearing involved an Egyptian bank. The network also reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had led the case, which centered on an informant’s tip that money had flowed through the bank to help fund Trump’s campaign. CNN also reported that, in the end stages of the probe, some prosecutors proposed subpoenaing Trump’s financial records, before “top officials” ultimately concluded that the case had reached a dead-end.
At the time, Trump spokesman Jason Miller rejected the allegation of money flowing to the campaign, saying: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”
The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.
In pursuing the Egyptian intelligence and other lines of investigation, Mueller’s team looked more deeply into Trump’s finances than has been previously reported. The Post found that investigators obtained bank records for some of the accounts Trump used most frequently when he was a candidate for office, and that debate inside the Justice Department centered on whether investigators could obtain additional records extending into the time Trump was president. Where some career investigators saw evidence that justified digging deeper, Barr and Liu expressed doubts.
Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.
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 convince 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 of 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.
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi was one of President Donald Trump's first guests at the White House as he visited Washington in April 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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.
The bank argued that it had nothing else to produce. “The Government is beating a dead horse over and over,” wrote its U.S.-based attorneys.
The two sides also argued over whether the center’s address was fake. The bank had reported conducting a site visit of its client in Cairo and finding 55 people working at the address. The U.S. government produced pictures at that address showing an apartment building.
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 if 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. A new round of investigative steps would be necessary to see if the money ever appeared on Trump’s side of the ledger.
‘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.
In a series of meetings beginning that April, FBI agents and supervisors told Liu they supported a proposal to subpoena Trump’s banking records, according to contemporaneous notes of the discussions. Liu had concerns about the scope, the notes say.
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.
Just two months earlier, Barr had preempted Mueller’s investigative report of the Russia probe by issuing a summary declaring that it found insufficient evidence that Trump had engaged in any crime. Barr’s move allowed Trump to claim “total exoneration,” despite Mueller citing “substantial evidence” that Trump had attempted to block scrutiny of his conduct.
Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. 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 discussion.
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.
Some career supervisors briefed on the developments sympathized with the challenge Liu faced. She was being asked to take the monumental step of probing the sitting president’s financial records in the wake of his claims that the Russia investigation had been based on a “hoax.”
CIA officials had also relayed to Liu concerns that apart from Trump’s bank records, other steps investigators also wanted to take could jeopardize their operations, according to people familiar with the discussions.
As the summer wore on, Barr also met with Wray and some of their top deputies to discuss the Egypt case. Two people with knowledge of the meeting described it to The Post.
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
Trump and Barr attend a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in May 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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.
Shea declined to answer detailed questions from The Post. Shea told associates that he had not conferred with Barr about the case, according to two people familiar with Shea’s description of events.
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.
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$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt
https://wapo.st/3SxAkvO
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.
Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.
Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.
Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.
The behind-the-scenes drama played out during an especially tense time for the Justice Department, with Trump accusing the agency of pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russian election interference, his appointees seeking to rein in investigators they saw as partisan, and some career supervisors growing wary of plunging the agency into yet another legal battle with the president.
Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.
Then-Attorney General William P. Barr did not order the Egypt case closed, but his actions steered it to that end, according to multiple people briefed on the case. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In June of 2020, the prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the office leading the case closed the probe, citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That conclusion belied the months of internal disagreements over whether investigators had been allowed to go far enough in seeking that evidence.
“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal dissension. “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 spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign did not answer a list of questions from The Post, instead referring to this story as “textbook Fake News.”
“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said by email. “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.”
An Egyptian government spokesman declined to answer detailed questions sent by The Post. “It is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments” in other countries, wrote Ayman Walash, the director of the Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Center. In his email, Walash also emphasized that the Justice Department had closed the investigation without charges.
As he campaigns to return to the White House, Trump has cast himself as a victim of “deep state” plots that sought to undermine his presidency, often focusing his ire on the Russia probe that shadowed much of his time in office.
That investigation did not ultimately find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Moscow. But it did conclude his team expected the campaign would benefit from Russian interference. Unbeknownst to the public, during the same period, Justice Department officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from the government of another foreign country — Egypt.
In the years since the Egypt case was closed, the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.” In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United States 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.
The Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. declined to answer detailed questions for this report. The FBI declined to answer The Post’s questions or to make Wray available to comment. Barr also declined to answer detailed questions for this report, and Liu did not respond to a similar inquiry.
In an interview, Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated national security cases, said he had previously closed some where sufficient evidence never materialized. “I made the same decision here and I stand by it,” Sherwin said.
This exclusive account of the Egypt investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits. The Post also interviewed more than two dozen people with knowledge of the investigation. The individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive probe that ended without criminal charges. Some showed The Post emails, texts and other documents corroborating their accounts.
The investigation was shrouded in secrecy for the entirety of the more than three years the case was open, from 2017 to 2020. It surfaced obliquely in that time only once, when senior judges closed a part of the federal courthouse in D.C. to hide the identities of the parties in a hearing then described as involving a state-owned foreign corporation that was resisting a subpoena. Many observers assumed the corporation was Russian.
In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race, after the investigation had been closed, CNN revealed that the mysterious courthouse hearing involved an Egyptian bank. The network also reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had led the case, which centered on an informant’s tip that money had flowed through the bank to help fund Trump’s campaign. CNN also reported that, in the end stages of the probe, some prosecutors proposed subpoenaing Trump’s financial records, before “top officials” ultimately concluded that the case had reached a dead-end.
At the time, Trump spokesman Jason Miller rejected the allegation of money flowing to the campaign, saying: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”
The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.
In pursuing the Egyptian intelligence and other lines of investigation, Mueller’s team looked more deeply into Trump’s finances than has been previously reported. The Post found that investigators obtained bank records for some of the accounts Trump used most frequently when he was a candidate for office, and that debate inside the Justice Department centered on whether investigators could obtain additional records extending into the time Trump was president. Where some career investigators saw evidence that justified digging deeper, Barr and Liu expressed doubts.
Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.
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 convince 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 of 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.
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi was one of President Donald Trump's first guests at the White House as he visited Washington in April 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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.
The bank argued that it had nothing else to produce. “The Government is beating a dead horse over and over,” wrote its U.S.-based attorneys.
The two sides also argued over whether the center’s address was fake. The bank had reported conducting a site visit of its client in Cairo and finding 55 people working at the address. The U.S. government produced pictures at that address showing an apartment building.
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 if 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. A new round of investigative steps would be necessary to see if the money ever appeared on Trump’s side of the ledger.
‘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.
In a series of meetings beginning that April, FBI agents and supervisors told Liu they supported a proposal to subpoena Trump’s banking records, according to contemporaneous notes of the discussions. Liu had concerns about the scope, the notes say.
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.
Just two months earlier, Barr had preempted Mueller’s investigative report of the Russia probe by issuing a summary declaring that it found insufficient evidence that Trump had engaged in any crime. Barr’s move allowed Trump to claim “total exoneration,” despite Mueller citing “substantial evidence” that Trump had attempted to block scrutiny of his conduct.
Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. 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 discussion.
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.
Some career supervisors briefed on the developments sympathized with the challenge Liu faced. She was being asked to take the monumental step of probing the sitting president’s financial records in the wake of his claims that the Russia investigation had been based on a “hoax.”
CIA officials had also relayed to Liu concerns that apart from Trump’s bank records, other steps investigators also wanted to take could jeopardize their operations, according to people familiar with the discussions.
As the summer wore on, Barr also met with Wray and some of their top deputies to discuss the Egypt case. Two people with knowledge of the meeting described it to The Post.
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
Trump and Barr attend a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in May 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
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.
Shea declined to answer detailed questions from The Post. Shea told associates that he had not conferred with Barr about the case, according to two people familiar with Shea’s description of events.
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.
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Two people you should never trust:
A religious leader who tells you how to vote.
A politician who tells you how to pray.
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