House Democrats ask Trump if he illegally accepted $10 million from Egypt

Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Tuesday asking former president Donald Trump if he ever illegally received money from the government of Egypt, and whether money from Cairo played a role in a $10 million infusion into his 2016 run for president.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, and Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the top Democrat on its subcommittee for national security, the border and foreign affairs, wrote to Trump that they were making the request as a result of a Washington Post article published last month. The article revealed details of a secret Justice Department investigation during Trump’s presidency into whether he took an illegal campaign contribution from Egypt.

As members of the House minority, Raskin and Garcia do not have the power to subpoena documents or witnesses, and Trump is under no obligation to respond to their inquiries. But the Democrats said the public deserves answers now that Trump is running for president again.

“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president - and a current candidate for president - took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the letter signed by the two Democrats reads. “Accordingly, we request that you immediately provide the Committee with information and documents necessary to assure the Committee and the American public that you never, directly or indirectly, politically or personally, received any fund from the Egyptian president or government.”

Asked for comment, the Trump campaign called reporting about Trump and Egypt “textbook Fake News.” The Justice Department investigation “found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said, repeating a statement he gave for The Post story last month. “None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact.”

The Post article reported that the investigation began early in 2017 in response to U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi had sought to send Trump $10 million. In May of that year, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who had been appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, agreed to take the lead on the Egypt investigation.

In early 2019, as Mueller was preparing to deliver his report on Russian interference and close his office, his team obtained records from Egyptian banking officials. The records revealed a cash withdrawal of nearly $10 million - an amount almost identical to what the intelligence indicated - from an account tied to the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, The Post reported. The withdrawal occurred in January 2017, five days before Trump took office.

The discovery intensified the probe. Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. who took over the case from Mueller proposed subpoenaing Trump’s bank records from a period that included Trump’s first months in the White House to see if any of the money from Cairo could be seen landing in Trump’s accounts, The Post reported.

But months after the handoff, The Post’s investigation found, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining those records. 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. Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case, told The Post he did so for lack of evidence.

Though the $10 million Trump injected into his election bid in 2016 was reported as a contribution, Trump privately signed papers to structure the funding as a loan, according to FBI interviews with campaign aides. BuzzFeed News later reported that aides said the president forgave the loan after taking office.

The letter Democrats released Tuesday asks Trump to name the source of any funds he used to repay himself for that forgiven loan, if he did, and to name any individuals or entities who were involved in funding, arranging or transferring money for the original loan to his campaign or its repayment.

Raskin and Garcia emphasized in the letter that the General Intelligence Service, Egypt’s intelligence agency and a key entity under scrutiny in the Justice Department investigation of Trump, has been implicated by U.S. prosecutors in an effort to corruptly buy influence with another prominent U.S. official, former senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. General Intelligence Service leaders helped fund cash bribes to Menendez through an Egyptian-American business. Menendez was convicted in July on charges of accepting bribes and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Egypt. He resigned from the Senate last month.