Alongside the Trump-Russia Inquiry, a Lesser-Known Look at Egyptian Influence
In the summer of 2017, as the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was starting his investigation, his agents and prosecutors were chasing potentially explosive allegations about foreign influence over Donald J. Trump and his campaign.
C.I.A. intelligence relayed to the special counsel’s office suggested that senior leaders of a foreign power had signed off on secretly funneling millions of dollars — with the help of a Trump campaign adviser acting as “a bag man” — to Mr. Trump in the final days of the 2016 election.
Interviews and other evidence obtained by the special counsel’s office showed that indeed Mr. Trump had lent his campaign a similar amount of money in the final days of the race — and, after beating Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump immediately struck a far more favorable tone toward the country than his predecessors.
The country in question, however, was not Russia. It was Egypt.
Seven years after Mr. Mueller’s team dug in on those allegations, people familiar with the investigation acknowledged that while much of the country’s attention was focused on ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, the most concrete lead Mr. Mueller’s team initially had about potential foreign influence over Mr. Trump involved Egypt. The people familiar with the inquiry discussed details of it on the condition of anonymity.
While Mr. Mueller has often been criticized for not moving aggressively enough to investigate Mr. Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia, his team took invasive steps to try to understand whether Mr. Trump or his campaign had received financial backing from Cairo.
Mr. Trump’s foreign business ties and efforts by foreign interests and government to influence him have come under scrutiny again as he seeks to return to the White House. The little-known investigation into possible Egyptian influence shows both the intensity of past efforts to explore the issue and how they have fueled Mr. Trump’s long-running assertions that he has been subject to a “witch hunt.”
The Egypt investigation would outlast Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, which shut down in 2019. It was picked up by career prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, who closed it out in the summer of 2020 without pursuing any charges. No evidence has ever surfaced publicly that Mr. Trump or his campaign directly received Egyptian money.
Details about the depth and breadth of the investigation have trickled out over the years. CNN laid out major elements of the investigation in October 2020, including that there was a secret legal fight between the Justice Department and an Egyptian bank. Investigators at the time were seeking bank records related to the matter, which ultimately ended up — under seal — being appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Washington Post on Friday disclosed further details, reporting that five days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017 an organization linked to Egyptian intelligence withdrew $10 million in cash from a bank in Cairo — the same amount that the C.I.A. had been told was given to Mr. Trump in the final days of his campaign. The report about the withdrawal was confirmed to The New York Times by a person briefed on the investigation.
The investigation started in the days after the 2016 election when the C.I.A. learned from a trusted confidential source that senior Egyptian leaders — including President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — had signed off on sending $10 million to Mr. Trump’s cash strapped campaign.
The Egyptian leaders, investigators would be told, had in mind someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit to move the money: a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Walid Phares, who had frequently appeared on Fox News.
The F.B.I. opened an investigation into Mr. Phares, with investigators trying to understand whether he was “a bag man.”
Mr. Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, was briefed on the details of the agency’s intelligence. In May 2017, Mr. Mueller was appointed special counsel after questions were raised about Mr. Trump’s attempts to interfere in F.B.I. investigations into his ties to Russia. Mr. Mueller was given a mandate to investigate Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 election and ties that four Trump campaign advisers had to Russia.
What the public did not know at the time was that Mr. Mueller had also been given the job of investigating Mr. Phares and the intelligence suggesting that Egypt had sought to funnel money to Mr. Trump.
Throughout the investigation, Mr. Mueller’s team was confronted with a range of allegations about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
But, in the eyes of some agents and prosecutors working on Mr. Mueller’s team, the intelligence about Egypt was far firmer than anything they had related to Mr. Trump and Russia. At the time, Mr. Trump was threatening to fire Mr. Mueller, drawing a red line around his personal finances.
But the evidence about Egypt allowed agents and prosecutors to convince Mr. Mueller to subpoena Mr. Trump’s bank records from the period of time during the campaign and just after the election that he might have received the money.
The records were not helpful in corroborating the allegations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Some investigators wanted to continue digging, but Mr. Mueller stopped short of seeking the records from when Mr. Trump took office, leaving some investigators disappointed.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators did devote significant resources to looking at Mr. Phares, who had told Trump campaign advisers that he could broker meetings between the Egyptian government and the campaign. Mr. Phares also took credit for arranging a September 2016 meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. el-Sisi, which investigators later examined.
American intelligence agencies had learned what agents and analysts thought was potentially corroborating evidence: that there were questions atop the Egyptian government whether Mr. Phares could be trusted to deliver the money.
The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Phares on multiple occasions, learning new details such as his contacts with Egyptian intelligence officials. But despite Mr. Phares initial cooperation with the investigators, he eventually hired a lawyer and stopped talking.
By 2019, Mr. Mueller’s team thought it had taken the investigation as far as it could. When Mr. Mueller’s Russia inquiry wound down, he referred the still-open Egyptian case to Justice Department prosecutors, who picked up where he left off.
It was around that same time that U.S. officials learned of the $10 million bank withdrawal in Cairo by the group linked to Egyptian intelligence agencies, sparking more suspicions among investigators.
In June 2020, The Times reported that the F.B.I. and special counsel’s office had investigated whether Mr. Phares had secretly worked for the Egyptian government to try to influence the incoming Trump administration. Mr. Phares declined to comment at the time and could not be reached on Friday.
But that summer, prosecutors decided they had hit a wall and closed out the case.
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