September 4, 2024 - Washington, D.C. - On Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs,are demanding answers  from Donald Trump after a bombshell report by the Washington Post surfaced new evidence suggesting the former president may have illegally accepted a $10 million campaign contribution from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi during the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign and that appointees in his own Department of Justice (DOJ) covered it up.

“A recent report from the Washington Post has created renewed suspicion that you collected a $10 million cash bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.  […]  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.  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 funds from the Egyptian President or Government,” wrote the Members.

On August 2, 2024, the Washington Post published a reportalleging that U.S. intelligence officials received “jaw-dropping” information that Egypt’s president sought to illegally inject $10 million into Trump’s cash-strapped campaign in the fall of 2016.

In early 2017, this information was passed on to Trump’s DOJ which began a years-long investigation based on these credible and corroborated allegations.

In September 2016, Trump metwith President El-Sisi for a closed-door meeting in New York City, and later praised the autocratic leader as a “fantastic guy”—a sharp departure from official U.S. policy.  On October 28, 2016, a few weeks after Trump met with President El-Sisi, Trump, who had steadfastly refused to put any more of his own money into his campaign, suddenly announced that he was personally contributing $10 million to his cash-strapped campaign.  These funds were used, in part, to air a campaign ad replete with antisemitic tropes in the final weeks of the campaign.

In early 2019, DOJ investigators obtained Egyptian financial documents showing that in January 2017, an entity affiliated with Egypt’s intelligence services withdrew $9,998,000 in U.S. currency—a large portion of Egypt’s dollar reserves—from a state-run bank branch.  Shortly after this breakthrough, federal investigators proposed subpoenas seeking Trump’s bank records.  Jessie Liu, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia who was overseeing the probe, had indicated she was open to issuing these subpoenas but “made a 180-degree turn” and refused to authorize them after consulting with Attorney General Barr.  By January 2020, Attorney General Barr had ordered Liu to step down.  Her hand-picked replacement, Michael Shwerwin, quickly moved to shut down the investigation.

Throughout his presidency, Trump drastically shifted U.S. policy to favor the Egyptian president, whom he once called his “favorite dictator.”  In 2018, Trump released $195 million in military aid that was previously withheld because of human rights abuses committed by the Egyptian government, and he later released $1.2 billion more in military assistance.

The letter comes on the heels of ongoing Oversight Democrats investigations into former President Trump’s conflicts of interests while in-office and as presidential candidate.  In January 2024, Oversight Democrats released a staff report uncovering how former President Donald Trump received at least $7.8 million from at least 20 foreign states and authoritarian leaders in blatant violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Cause, and, in many cases, rendered a sequence of foreign policy favors to his patrons.  In May 2024, Ranking Member Raskin sought answers from top oil and gas CEOs following reports that Trump sought $1 billion in campaign contributions from the oil industry in exchange for an explicit promise that, if elected in 2024, his Administration would dismantle fossil fuel regulations and change energy policy to benefit their companies.

“The serious and specific allegations raised by the Washington Post’s report—both that you received a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt’s President and that your political appointees at the DOJ blocked an ongoing investigation into this potential bribe—now compel our Committee to seek more information to clear this matter up.  As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared in August 2023, at the start of the impeachment investigation that totally and thoroughly exonerated President Biden of any wrongdoing, ‘I think this President would want to clear [his] name rather rapidly.’  We are sure you too would be eager to rebut these claims of outrageous corruption.  In that spirit, Mr. Trump, we ask you to cooperate with this Committee’s investigation,” the Members concluded.

Click here  to read the letter.
Source: House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Democrats