A secret probe of Egyptian influence puts Trump’s emolumental corruption back in the spotlight

Hello from sweltering Washington, DC, where I read Clare Malone’s profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr this morning after watching John Oliver consider his candidacy on Last Week Tonight. (Look for video on You Tube this week.) Both are worth your time, as we all look ahead to the presidential election this fall.

Alex Howard here, with a new civic text. Please bear with me while I get back up to speed after a couple weeks in Maine and stepping way back from being extremely online. Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed so far! Please share widely and consider upgrading to a paid subscription, if you can afford it.

Did anything happen while I was focused offline?

But seriously: the news cycle in July felt like 2016 all over again, and August has hardly been a return to the doldrums, from a historic prisoner swap (🎁) to the growing risk of wider war in the Middle East as tensions grow between Iran and Israel to the ongoing Olympics in Paris. More is inbound: Perhaps as early as today and certainly by tomorrow, Vice President Kamala Harris will announce her running mate.

The most important story obscured by the deluge of news might be that (🎁https://wapo.st/46xnd3k) former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr took actions that led 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“ to close, due to insufficient evidence.

“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.“

If that’s the quid, then this was the pro:

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.

As the Post reported, Trump was being investigated at the time by special counsel Robert Mueller, who had been appointed to probe the actions Russia has taken to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Once in office, Trump obstructed that investigation in multiple ways, as Mueller‘s report documented, while denying that he has been negotiating a real-estate project in Moscow.

Contrary to the claims of Trump and his allies, Mueller told Congress Trump was not exonerated — rather, the special counsel found that they didn’t have sufficient evidence to prove a conspiracy in court, and informed all Americans of the ways Trump had obstructed his investigation — and wrote that his office had accepted an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that a sitting President couldn’t be charged.

I read that entire report years ago, along with the mammoth Senate Intelligence Reports on Russian active measures in 2016, including dozens of contacts with the Trump campaign.

I have the sense that doing so puts me in the minority of Americans. I still assume millions of my fellow countryman have done the same. Each report is worth your time, in their own ways.

In my view, Mueller failed our union by failing to follow the money to Russia and beyond, drive a counterintelligence investigation, & forcing Trump to testify under oath about his relationship to Russia, China, or other foreign governments.

Trump went on to be the most corrupt president in American history — even before he was impeached for corruption in 2019 and then again for abusing entrusted power to seek to overturn the 2020 election.

Sadly, it’s been clear for years that Trump will face no accountability for taking emoluments in office in defiance of the anti-corruption clauses of the Convention, as documented by a staff report in January 2024 that showed he received at least $7.8 million from 20 different foreign governments — perhaps just the tip of an iceberg.

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin had this to say about emolumental corruption in January:

"After promising ‘the greatest infomercial in political history,' former President Donald Trump repeatedly and willfully violated the U.S. Constitution by failing to divest from his business empire and allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars in payments from some of the most corrupt nations on earth. The limited records that the Committee obtained show that while Donald Trump was in office, he received more than $5.5 million from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as millions more from 19 other foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia through just four of the more than 500 entities he owned. The governments making these payments sought specific foreign policy outcomes from President Trump and his Administration. Each dollar former President Trump accepted violated the Constitution's strict prohibition on payments from foreign governments, which the Founders enacted to prevent presidents from selling out U.S. foreign policy to foreign leaders.”

Whether Trump faces accountability for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, as alleged by the Justice Department in a historic indictment, remains to be seen. As Politico reports, the criminal case against Trump began to move again here in DC this weekend:

On Saturday, Chutkan took her first steps in the case in months, setting an August 16 hearing to consider setting a new schedule. She has asked for prosecutors and Trump to offer their own thinking on the matter in writing by August 9

Unlike any previous candidate, Trump is blatantly running for office to evade accountability for corruption in office, and is telegraphing his intention to stay in power should he win re-election, and to abuse it again for personal gain. Don’t lose signal in the noise: the stakes are as high as they come.

As always, feel free to reach out over email at alex@governing.digital with tips, questions, comments, suggestion, or other feedback.