I see that Rep. Jamie Raskin is trying to follow up on a weird Washington Post story from a month ago:
Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Tuesday asking former president Donald Trump if he ever illegally received money from the government of Egypt, and whether money from Cairo played a role in a $10 million infusion into his 2016 run for president.
I don't know if Trump will bother responding, but if he does his answer will be "No." And that will be that.
This whole episode is kind of weird. I read the Post story about this a month ago, and wrote the following timeline about it:
September 2016: Trump meets Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on the sidelines of a UN meeting.
October 2016: Trump gives his campaign $10 million.
January 2017: Sisi withdraws $10 million in cash from Egypt's central bank.
"Early" 2017: CIA receives report that Sisi sought to send $10 million to Trump.
Spring 2017: Robert Mueller sets up Team 10 to investigate. They subpoena Trump bank records from 2016.
2019: Case turns cold. FBI agents ask permission to subpoena Trump banking records from 2017. They are denied.
I never bothered publishing this, and it's pretty obvious why: there's nothing there. There's a "report" that Sisi wanted to send $10 million to Trump, but no evidence that he did. And over the past month the Post has failed to move the story beyond that.
So there's maybe some slight interest here for conspiratorial types, but exactly zero in the way of concrete evidence. Until and unless that leaks out, Trump merely has to deny everything and there's nothing more to say.
POSTSCRIPT: From a purely political viewpoint, there may be some value in forcing Trump to issue a denial. Maybe. But I imagine the reason it took so long for anyone to do even that is because they were waiting for more evidence. That never came.
I guess Kevin skipped the part where Bill Barr blocked the investigators from actually seeing Trump’s bank records….just a tiny detail, really not worth mentioning……
goingBlue - its curious, mind you its been the Biden Justice Department for almost four years, why this issue was not investigated.
Not sure what the crimes would be, but Biden took office ca. 4-5 years after the alleged crimes--so statute of limitations comes into play. And they were dealing with other Trump crimes...
The reason given was that the Biden admin was not aware of the closed case and was subsequently overwhelmed with cases involving the attemped coup. The statute of limitations ran out within a year of the Biden admin taking over.
IDK why one would expect more evidence to pop up when the investigation was shut down by Barr. Got no subpoena power and no leverage against a foreign leader to spill the beans.
I don't think it's a matter of if there's a there, there. It looks to me that Raskin is laying down a predicate to investigate at a later date.
If we switch out the "Trump" name for "Harris" in this story, do you think Fox or WSJ would refrain from running with it?
Good point.
Kevin, c'mon! Where's your partisan imagination? If James Comer had been given soup this thin on Biden, he'd have ginned it up into The Scandal of the Century™ and a dozen new impeachment hearings by now. It would be all the NYT and Sunday Morning interview shows would be talking about.
Yet another example of what happens when your side doesn't command the kind of multimedia disinformation ecosystem the other side does.
Might have been Keven or it might have been some other blogger that I read frequently, but whoever it was talked about a pundit gap. This is a good example.
Right leaning pundits would be riding this constantly despite the lack of proof. Left leaning pundits say--well we think there might be something here but we can't prove it so we should drop it. Very different universes.
I think we call it the "hack gap" -- but yeah, this is exactly it. The right has this media "Hack Force" consisting of partisan pundits, AM talk radio hosts, various bloggers/podcasters and Fox News -- all of whom read from the same script and will beat the same dead horse if instructed to -- and then the MSM media outlets get FOMO for not covering something, but by the time they do, Hack Force makes sure it's almost always based on their framing of the issue.
Well, we don't want to be like them.
... except maybe when mentioning Vance had sex with a couch, cause that’s funny. And it gives MAGA a small taste of their own medicine.
Sisi must have done something to prompt Trump's very public carrying on about Sisi being so great.
A couple of things here make me want Raskin to keep digging on this.
1. The investigation was squashed by Barr, the absolutely most corrupt motherfucker in the history of corrupt motherfuckers. See point 3.
2. Trump would never give $10 million to anything, even himself, unless he were assured of making it up somewhere on the backend. Witness his payoff to Stormy Daniels. He could have *easily* just given her cash out of his own account, but no. He's such a goddamn skinflint that he had to devise an elaborate scheme to have Michael Cohen pay her and then illegally reimburse him with misappropriated business funds.
3. This isn't all that new. We forget that this was also reported in a 2020 CNN story on the Mueller investigations when we learned that Mueller had a dedicated team looking at the Egypt-Trump matter and that some of its subpoena requests had gone as far as the SCOTUS before Barr put the kaibosh on it. What was he homing in on? (https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/five-takeaways-mueller-secret-investigation/index.html)
Lack of any evidence has never stopped the MAGA GOP from spewing out bull shit about the corrupt Biden "Crime Family".
So worse case (for Il Duce) is that he may be guilty of committing a few more felonies. His supporters won't care and it will not move the needle in the election.
Would video from the Apprentice of that Orange shit head saying the "N" word would really nail the coffin on his campaign? Of course 8 years ago most thought that his "grab them by the ____" audio tape would put an end to him.
On the other hand, there's this https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudi-arabias-dar-al-arkan-signs-deal-with-trump-family-oman-project-2022-11-20/
And this https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/trump-organization-saudi-arabia-tower.html
...it's pretty obvious...: there's nothing there.
How is that pretty obvious? You seem to be ready to conclude that Trump is innocent because no hard evidence has been published.
If it weren't for an alarming pattern of Trump repeatedly escaping scrutiny from media and the justice system, along with decades of the guy committing virtually every conceivable crime in the book with impunity, then a reasonable person might figure there is nothing there.
On the other hand, this is Donald Trump we're taking about. You can say a search for hard evidence might be unfruitful, but (damn!) look for it at least. No one should be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
This is 2024 and we were not born September 2nd. Let's not be suckers.
Kevin seems to have missed the part where the money was laundered through a bank in China and a pallet of cash was sent to Egypt, which then promptly disappeared and that the release of the bank records were held up by the courts for four years.
Oh, come on. When it reports that the investigators asked Trump if he'd done something monstrous, surely it uses the ever so polite diction of the mainstream media in approaching him to say that they asked for records concerning guilt and innocence. But we shall see, or won't given his protections.
Meanwhile imagine how something like this would play into Murdoch's harping on the Biden family. Or imagine if today's NYT article on real-estate favors to Kushner and family got picked up by talk and more of the press.
Let me put it another way. Kevin seems to find the lack of interest in the query to Trump as settling his innocence. But anyone would reply to a charge with a no. (Surely Kevin has heard of not guilty pleas and press statements.) But does that really prove innocence?
The real question is why prosecutors chose to revive the case., however lamely. True, the WSJ doesn't inquire, but shouldn't we? I know Kevin isn't shilling for Trump, just showing off how clever he is. But it's still worth asking.
Any one know how much Bibi withdrew??
I understand that these are allegations and that there is no direct proof and we democrats don’t believe in conspiracy theories. That said, I bet he got the money, let’s find the evidence.
of course he did
It all sounds so unlike something Trump would do . . . NOT!!!
That was my thought exactly! Kevin asks "Did Donald Trump take $10 million from Egypt?"
If the answer is no, it woudn't be for a lack of trying on Trump's part.
Given all the other Trump corruption and profiting off of the presidency, it is ridiculous and dishonest to call interest in the story 'conspiratorial'.
Wouldn't it be impossible to know if this was true unless it was actually investigated? Wouldn't the first steps be to subpoena the bank records which Bill Barr blocked?
I don't know for sure, but I've always assumed Clinton had literally every transaction he'd ever done subpoenaed in the 90s. And I also assumed a lot of records where subpoenaed during the stupid Email crap and Clinton Cash crap and I assume Trump's Justice Department subpoenaed lots of Biden and Hunter records.
It is true that I could be wrong and maybe none of it was subpoenaed, but until someone actually says the words: "None of it was subpoenaed" - I'm going to assume it was. Oh, and in case you forgot, they never found one illegal or even questionable transaction. Nothing.
Having someone in Justice actually look at Trump's records is not a big deal. It isn't just randomly checking to see what could be found. It is a specific allegation and if nothing turns up the whole thing goes away. I have no idea why Kevin would be against that.
You must learn to write headlines like Fox Entertainment. Put a question mark at the end of an accusation. "Trump took $10 million from Egypt?" Then add "It seems like it" for good measure.