- We are going to make our country great again. (crowd cheering) - It's January 15th, 2017. In five days, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president of the United States.
Thousands of miles away in Cairo, Egypt, at this bank 11 kilometers from the international airport, a bank manager receives a handwritten note from someone who holds an account at the bank. The note asks him to, quote, "Kindly withdraw a sum of 9,998,000 US dollars. " This was unusual.
But according to bank records, bank employees did what they were told, heading to a vault full of US dollars and assembling stacks of $100 bills into two large bags. It all weighed about 200 pounds and comprised a large part of all of the US dollars that were in Egypt at the time now sitting in bags in the manager's office. Until later that day when four men showed up.
They verified that they were associated with the account and they took the money, put it into a truck, and left. The bank account where that $10 million was taken out of belonged to a shadowy organization called The Research and Studies Center. It was an Egyptian entity, but it's an entity that US Intelligence believes is a front for the general intelligence services of Egypt.
Basically Egypt's international spy agency, the Egyptian CIA, let's say. So the Egyptian CIA takes out $10 million. And from here, the trail goes cold.
Because shortly after this transfer of $10 million, the account is closed. And that entity, The Research and Studies Center who owned the account, apparently doesn't exist anymore. Why did the Egyptian CIA need $10 million in cash?
Who were these men who collected it? What were they doing, and what, if anything, does this $10 million have to do with former President Donald Trump? This is a really important set of questions, one that the FBI and federal lawyers have been secretly investigating to try to answer for years because they strongly suspected that this $10 million made its way into the hands of the Trump campaign, a foreign country trying to buy the election.
And in exchange, buying loyalty from the new president. And they suspected that Trump may have known about this and accepted this bribe. And if he did, that would be a violation of federal law.
I wanna tell you this story of this investigation and how it was suddenly shut down by Department of Justice officials who were appointed by Donald Trump. This recently released Washington Post investigation reveals that there was much, much more going on that we didn't know about until just now. So I'm gonna try to visualize this story, show it to you in the clearest way possible.
Now listen, I know that this is a very politically sensitive topic. There's an election coming up. We all are taking our sides.
I commit to you that I'm going to stick to rock solid facts here. I'm gonna lay them out the best I can and show you the evidence that clearly demonstrates how we know these facts. Whenever I'm making circumstantial connections or my own analysis, I will try to make that very clear.
Ultimately, I wanna lay this all out and let you make a decision as to whether you think there was wrongdoing here, whether you think something needs to be changed or someone needs to be held accountable. As always, every assertion in this video is fact checked and linked in my sources by time code. You can always check that out, scrutinize it, leave comments if you have issues with it.
And with that, let's dive in. - Today I wrote another check for $10 million. I'm spending money like crazy.
President El-Sisi has been somebody that's been very close to me from the first time I met him. I met during the campaign. Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?
- Hey, before we go on, I wanna explain something about our methodology of reporting on stories like this. Going deep on stories takes weeks, like, sometimes six or eight or 10 weeks to like really understand these stories. And a tool we've been using more and more is Ground News, who is the sponsor of today's video.
Ground News is a website and an app that gathers news from around the world and condenses it into one single article. They'll show you this story and then they'll show you who's covering it, how factual the different sources are, who those sources are owned by, and what political leaning or bent is present in the coverage. All of this happening in one seamless experience both on mobile and desktop.
Let me give you an example from this very story. If you type in the Trump Egypt story into Ground News, you can see that more than a dozen news outlets have picked up the story and almost all of the coverage is from the left. Only 13% of the coverage comes from right-leaning publications.
And you can see that one left-leaning source claims that democracy will die if the case against Trump is dropped. While a right-leaning source downplays the event as a, quote, "brief probe. " I mean, there's a ton of bias present in both of these headlines, and Ground News lets you easily see that.
There's also this feature called My News Bias, where you can look at your reading habits, the top sources that you're drawn to, how reliable the articles are that you read, and it will help flag blind spots in your information, the stuff that you're either avoiding consciously or unconsciously. In other words, it helps get you out of your echo chamber, which, in this day and age, is becoming more and more important. So if you value critical thinking and unbiased news, this is probably a good tool for you.
And Ground News is offering a 40% discount to people who use my link. It is GroundNews. com/JohnnyHarris.
You can also use this lovely QR code that's on screen. You'll get 40% off the Vantage plan, which has all these features that I talked about. Make sure to scan the QR code or use the link if you do sign up 'cause that helps out the channel.
So, thank you Ground News for sponsoring today's video, supporting our journalism. And with that, let's dive back into this story about Donald Trump and Egypt. (pensive music) All right, hold on a sec.
I have been using this elementary school penmanship practice paper for about 10 years as my note taking platform. And I don't know why, but I love it. Okay.
To keep things totally rock solid, crystal clear, I'm gonna make a list. I'm gonna call this list, What We Know. And in this box, on this list, I am going to put the things that we truly know that are rock solid facts to keep us crystal clear.
Number one, we know that Egypt wanted to give money to Donald Trump's campaign. They planned on it, they approved it. How do we know that?
The CIA. "Ah, Johnny Harris talking about the CIA again. Here we go.
" The CIA spies on everyone. We know that. We know they spy on foreign countries and foreign leaders.
And during the 2016 presidential campaign, we know that they had a confidential informant within the Egyptian government. This was a reliable informant who had given the CIA reliable information in the past. They trusted this person.
Between this informant and, quote, "other operations," the CIA learned that, quote, "Egyptian leaders, including Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had signed off on sending $10 million to Mr Trump's cash-trapped campaign. " They say this happened just before the 2016 election. Okay, let's go back to our list here and make this more specific.
The CIA is actually saying that they know that the president of Egypt, El-Sisi, actually signed off on giving Donald Trump $10 million, specifically $10 million. We were never supposed to learn about this intel, by the way. This was totally classified, part of a secret investigation.
And in my mind this intel is quite reliable. It comes from multiple sources, it comes from a reliable informant. And the CIA used it as a way to pass along to the Department of Justice their concern that there may have been some foreign interference from Egypt.
And with that, let's get back to this guy, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the president of Egypt. He's a military man who rose to power in 2014 after kicking out Egypt's first democratically-elected president, who by the way was horribly unpopular and the people also kind of wanted to kick him out. But, yeah, he rose the power in a coup and then just held on to power.
And predictably, once he consolidated power, he started silencing the press, squashing political dissent or political opponents, locking people up, arresting journalists and activists, et cetera, et cetera. Same old story. But his record was so bad that during the Obama administration, the US cut Egypt off of billions of dollars of military aid that we usually send them.
We cut it off to basically punish El-Sisi for all of these horrible human rights abuses. So Egypt gets cut off from all this vital military aid. But not for long.
(pensive music) Okay, here's the second thing we know. Trump and El-Sisi met up in New York during the campaign, like when he was still a candidate. It was September, 2016, a few weeks before the election.
They're at the UN headquarters. (crowd cheering) And they have this closed door meeting. And according to the Trump campaign, Trump was very warm to El-Sisi.
Now remember, the US was keeping Egypt at arms length because of all these human rights abuses. So, like, that was the MO for diplomats. Trump totally breaks from all of that in true Trump fashion.
Says that he loves El-Sisi, he's gonna invite him to the White House. The campaign says that the US will be, quote, "a loyal friend to Egypt. " Here he is on Fox News right after the meeting.
- [Donald] He's a fantastic guy. He took control of Egypt and I thought it was a great meeting. We met for a long time, actually.
We had a long meeting. - So that's the other thing we know. That's why it's on this list.
Trump loves El-Sisi, they have a good chemistry. Trump wants to help Egypt. So it's actually not surprising that Egypt wants to help Trump win.
Like, this would be very good for El-Sisi, which explains point number one here. El-Sisi signed off on this plan to give $10 million to Trump according to good CIA intelligence because he wanted him to win. It would benefit him and his regime if Trump won.
(pensive music) Now, a little context here, presidential campaigns are really messy and hard in the last few weeks. Campaigns kind of have to spend millions and millions of dollars in like the last two weeks leading up to the election to blitz on advertising, on travel, on like get out the vote campaigns. But the Trump campaign found itself in a tricky situation in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
They didn't have the money to do this. They were running out. So what did the campaign do?
They asked Trump himself for money. This post investigation reveals that they pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. And the response was, no.
"Trump repeatedly declined. " He didn't wanna give any more of his own money to this campaign. That is until October 28th, 2016.
It's five weeks after Trump and El-Sisi met in New York, and Trump suddenly changes his mind and announces that he's going to write a check to his campaign for this final blitz. And how much is he going to give? $10 million.
- [Donald] Today I wrote another check for $10 million. I'm spending money like crazy. (crowd cheering) - Now, one small thing here, Trump advisors told the FBI that while this $10 million looked like a contribution, like a donation from Trump to his campaign, they actually structured it as a loan.
$10 million that could be paid back to Trump. Okay, so we know that President El-Sisi signed off on giving Trump's campaign $10 million. Why?
Because Trump and El-Sisi are friends and a Trump presidency would benefit El-Sisi and his regime greatly. We also know that Trump who refused to give money to his campaign in the final weeks leading up to the election suddenly changed his mind and wrote a check for $10 million to his campaign, which was a loan to be paid back. Okay, I'm gonna add that to the list.
Does this all feel solid to everyone? Like, we're. .
. Like, these are rock solid facts in my mind. And now let's just add the point that we talked about at the very beginning, that five days before Trump was inaugurated, $10 million of cash.
. . Or sorry, $9,998,000, two grand away from $10 million, was loaded up in two bags in cash and carted away, taken out of a bank account that is associated with El-Sisi's intelligence agency.
I'm gonna add this to the list. So looking at these four items, doesn't it kind of feel obvious? Doesn't your brain want to connect the dots and paint a picture that it feels very clear in my brain?
President, El-Sisi, who we know wants to give $10 million to his new friend Donald Trump orders $10 million to be taken out of a bank and secretly transferred to Trump's campaign. And Trump knowing this suddenly feels comfortable loaning his campaign exactly $10 million, knowing that he'd be repaid from this money from Egypt. Doesn't it all lined up?
Like, case closed. We can just like convict somebody. No, that's not how it works.
That's not how the burden of proof works. It's not how our justice system works. This list, while full of robust facts, still doesn't paint a picture of any wrongdoing.
It is in the realm of circumstantial evidence. $10 million over here, $10 million over here, they must connect. But investigators never found the connection.
They never found the $10 million flowing in to Trump's bank account. And therefore, this is circumstantial evidence and not rock solid provable anything. But luckily, when we have this, that's what investigations are for.
(gentle percussive music) Soon after Trump takes office, the Department of Justice launches an investigation. Because remember, this is when the CIA told them that quote, "El-Sisi signed off on giving Trump $10 million. " This was concerning intel and it was happening at a time, if you remember, that there was a lot of concern about foreign interference in American democracy.
A lot of that focused on Russia. That was public, that was a big thing. We all talked about Russia foreign interference.
But at the same time, there was this investigation happening into whether Egypt helped buy the 2016 election. It was all happening quietly in the background because it was pretty sensitive. We're talking about potential bribery of a sitting president.
So the FBI and investigators are looking into this, trying to find evidence of potential wrongdoing. Meanwhile, president Trump takes office and starts to do exactly what he kind of promised he would do when it came to Egypt. He invites El-Sisi as one of the first guests to the White House.
He calls him, and this is a direct quote from someone who was in the room at the G7 Summit in France. Quote, "My favorite dictator. " God, Trump.
Boy. "My favorite dictator. " And then remember how Egypt had been cut off by the Obama administration of like $1.
4 billion of military aid? Trump unfreezes that money and it starts to flow to El-Sisi, not for anything in return, just give El-Sisi the money. And this was against the advice of his first secretary of state.
He said like, "This is not a good idea. " And Trump's like, "Yes, it is. " $1.
4 billion to Egypt. Now listen, if, big word, "if. " Put if on the screen.
If El-Sisi had bribed Trump with $10 million to help get him elected, then his investment is paying off. He is benefiting a ton from a Trump presidency. Now, we don't know if he did.
We don't have any direct evidence that he did. But if he did, pretty good investment. So while this is all happening, the FBI and federal investigators continue to try to find a link.
$10 million leaving Egypt. Did it ever enter Donald Trump's bank account somehow? To find this out, they took the investigatory step of requesting Donald Trump's personal bank records.
They were gonna look at them to find large transactions to see if $10 million showed up sometime before the election. So let's get a calendar out here. The FBI requested records spanning May to November, 2016, the months leading up to the election.
But guess what? They didn't find anything. They found no suspicious deposits from foreign entities of $10 million.
So then they decided to go look at the Egyptian bank and get their records and they fought in this massive battle that is wild, and it's detailed in The Post investigation because the Egyptian bank didn't want to give over their records. They're like, "No, no, no, no, no. We're not gonna give over our records because that would," quote, "wreak havoc on American foreign policy, possibly alienating US allies, undermining diplomatic efforts, and inviting reciprocal treatment.
" Geez, what's in these records, Egyptian bank? Like, what is in these records that's gonna topple American foreign policy? So this epic court battle goes down, there's like a secret investigation and court thing happening in DC.
It goes all the way to the Supreme Court. And finally, the Egyptian bank has to surrender the records. And this is how we learn about the big transfer in US dollars that happened from the Egyptian bank in cash.
They didn't know about this before. But the investigators notice something weird about all of these records that they got from the Egyptian bank, which is that other than that tiny handwritten note that said, "Put $10 million in two bags and four guys are gonna come pick it up," they felt like something was missing. And I'm gonna quote directly from The Post here, just so clear.
They found that the bank, quote, "had not turned over a single email of that enormous same day transaction," the $10 million of cash, and "that the lack of any internal communication on such a huge sum of money, same day transaction, was unthinkable. " The US prosecutor who was heading this case continues with, "Its strains credulity that the bank kept such a stockpile of US dollars on hand, let alone that it was able to be gathered up in less than 24 hours. " Translation, the bank probably didn't give over all their records.
Like, really, there was no other like emails being like, "Hey, there's gonna be a $10 million transaction from this bank branch near the airport. " So they're probably missing some records, but they did get that handwritten note that talked about the $10 million transfer in cash five days before the inauguration. January 15th, let's get back to the calendar.
Now, remember, the FBI had access to Trump's bank records from May to November, 2016. So if the $10 million was going to the Trump campaign, the FBI wouldn't see it because they only had Trump's records up to November, 2016. "Okay, well, that's easy," says the FBI.
"Now that we have new information about this $10 million transfer from Egypt, let's just get a wider set of records from Trump's bank, something after January 15th so that we can see if some $10 million deposit shows up there. " This is like standard investigatory procedure. One FBI agent told The Post that if this were any other investigation, they would have a justification to get these records, quote, "in a heartbeat.
" But because this wasn't any other investigation, this was investigating the finances of a sitting president, they would have to ask their boss for permission. And who is their boss? This guy, Bill Barr.
And here's where the investigation starts to deteriorate, unfortunately. (pensive music) Bill Barr was appointed by Donald Trump to be the Attorney General. That's the head of the Department of Justice, the top law enforcer of America.
Bill Barr can reasonably be considered a Trump ally. You may disagree with me on this. And if you do, please say so in the comments.
I'd love to hear your rebuttal to what I'm about to say. His job is to keep the president legal and honest. And yet, what he showed during his tenure is that he would often side with Trump.
He would undermine investigations against him and he even stoked fears of voter fraud in 2020 without real evidence. Though he did eventually come out and affirm that the 2020 election was not stolen because there's no evidence that it was. But, yeah, the guy is a Trump ally.
And the big question is, why does the president get to appoint the person who is supposed to keep him legal and honest? The American system is not perfect and there's also other special sort of controls on how we keep the president honest, even if this guy's biased and politically motivated. Anyway, I'm not gonna go into that.
That's a story for another day. The point is, Bill Barr, we can say is a Trump ally and he is the boss of all these people who are investigating the Trump-Egypt connection. So he hears about this investigation, he hears that the agents want to expand the amount of bank records that they can get on Trump so that they can see if there was a $10 million deposit after the cash left Egypt.
And he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it one bit. He goes to the FBI director and he says, "Hey, you need to," quote, "impose adult supervision on these agents who are," quote, "hell bent on getting a wider range of Trump's records.
" Adult supervision. Yikes. That doesn't sound good.
Barr starts voicing doubt about the actual agents who are working on this investigation and starts to question whether or not there's even enough evidence to continue the investigation. Now, a note about the agents. If Bill Barr is politically appointed and potentially marred by political bias, the investigators in this case often are not.
They're career employees of the department. They are there because they are good at their job. They have shown that they're committed to the values of justice in America.
They've not risen because they have garnered favor with some political person, at least not as much as political appointees. Politics is in everything. It's impossible to escape it.
But these career investigators have different incentives. And these career investigators felt strongly that this investigation needed to continue. That they had evidence that the next logical step was to get a wider range of Trump's records so they could see if this $10 million shows up and they are met with more and more resistance by Barr and other Trump appointed leaders within the Department of Justice.
This drama, this tension, which was all happening in secret, is now thoroughly documented in this Washington Post investigation. I recommend that you read it because the The Post interviewed like dozens of these people who were in the room, and it paints a picture that is very clear. The political appointees didn't want this to happen.
It all comes to an end when Barr kind of suddenly replaces the prosecutor who was working on this case with someone who was more aligned with him. And he almost immediately pumps the brakes on this investigation. He halts it.
A few months later, BARR replaces that person with a new prosecutor who then sends out an email with the subject line "Egypt Investigation. " The Post looked at this email, verified it, and it states that, quote, "Based on review of this investigation, we would be," quote, "closing the above matter with no conviction or indictment. " So it was over.
That was it. Whether or not that $10 million from Cairo ended up in Trump's world and whether or not Trump knew that that $10 million was coming, and therefore he gave $10 million to his campaign knowing he would get paid back, whether Trump's actions as president, actions that greatly benefited Egypt were the result of this money influencing his decisions, we will probably never know any of this. And in the eyes of the career prosecutors working on this, because the mechanism through which we know things, investigation was shut down too early and through politically motivated bias.
Now, that's my read. I'm gonna make it very clear. That's my read on this.
You should read the accounts of these prosecutors who felt like it was shut down too early. My read, my connection is that it was done by a Trump ally for politically motivated reasons. And so all we're left with is this, a list of some rock solid facts that look pretty fishy, but nonetheless are not rock solid evidence of wrongdoing.
In 2021, a new administration came into the White House. They could have reopened this investigation and seen it through properly. And yet, the new Attorney General wasn't briefed on this until a year later.
But by then, it had been more than five years since those two bags of cash were filled with $10 million in Cairo, meaning, this thing called the statute of limitations had expired. It was too late. They couldn't actually prosecute this.
The Post reached out to the Trump campaign. And in reply, they said, quote, "The Washington Post is consistently played for suckers by deep state Trump-haters and bad faith actors peddling hoaxes and shams. " Okay.
And then just recently, in September, 2023, New Jersey Democratic Senator, Bob Menendez, was charged in a case that alleges that he used his political influence to benefit Egypt in exchange for cash, gold bars, and other luxury items. - [Reporter] He accepted these gifts from businessmen acting on behalf of the Egyptian government. - He was bribed by Egypt.
Like, we know Egypt does this. I mean, we could add this to the circumstantial list. Egypt likes to bribe people.
Okay, to end this, I just wanna make it crystal clear, like, crystal, crystal clear that I am not saying that Donald Trump or anyone in his campaign should be convicted or found guilty for a crime in this case. It is so tempting to connect all the dots here and just say like, "Well, yeah, clearly, he did something wrong. It all adds up.
" But we just can't. That is not how justice works. Trump must be presumed innocent until there's sufficient evidence to prove otherwise.
But to me, there's still something condemnable here, which is that a group of political appointees were able to shut down an investigation that career prosecutors said should not be shut down because there were further investigatory steps to take, rational reasonable steps that they would've taken on any other case. But in this case, they couldn't. That's the travesty here.
To me, that's not justice, that's politics. So with that, I wanna leave you with a strong recommendation to read the full investigation from the Washington Post. There's more detail in there that sheds light on how this went down.
And I'm grateful for the reporters who spent the months and months uncovering this because it brings it to light. Maybe if we see this and understand it and talk about it, it'll be less likely to happen again. Thanks for watching, folks.
See you the next one. - [Donald] He's a fantastic guy. Took control of Egypt and got along.
There was a good chemistry there. You know when you have good chemistry with people. You're (indistinct) of that.
And there was a very good chemistry, good feeling between us. And I really enjoyed that meeting. It was the other day.
And he's done a very good job and we had a very respectful meeting.
