Mysterious $10m withdrawal fueled ‘secret probe’ into whether Egypt gave Trump campaign cash

Did a potential $10 million cash payment from Egypt’s authoritarian ruler, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, have anything to do with Donald Trump’s affection for him?

That was the crux of a now-closed federal probe launched in 2016, new details of which were published Friday in an investigation by The Washington Post.

The Post connected the dots from a $9,998,000 withdrawal from a Cairo bank five days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 to a seeming front for Egyptian intelligence, fueling an investigation into whether the former president had taken money from El-Sisi for his presidential campaign.

But the official investigation was derailed by Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, before agents were able to get all the evidence they needed to bring a case, according to the Post, which the paper’s sources said will likely never be reopened — leaving aside the fact that the statute of limitations on prosecuting the case, which would have been charges as a campaign finance violation, expired in 2022.

The $100 bills spirited out of the bank weighed nearly 200 pounds in total and required four men to cart it all away, the Post report said. The CIA had received intelligence that El-Sisi had been looking to give Trump’s presidential campaign a $10 million cash infusion as the election neared, and investigators were chasing down a raft of solid leads.

For example, two months prior to Election Day, Trump met with El-Sisi behind closed doors on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in Manhattan, itself a break with recent US tradition. After the meeting, the Trump campaign immediately announced that Trump promised El-Sisi that the US planned to be a “loyal friend” to Egypt, and called him a “fantastic guy” in an