Former Attorney General Bill Barr blocked a federal investigation into a $10m donation Donald Trump received from the Egyptian government just five days before his inauguration.
In a new bombshell report on Friday from The Washington Post, unnamed sources revealed that such a payment would violate U.S. law (not that staying within the confines of legality has ever been important to anyone in TrumpWorld), but Barr put the kibosh on any attempts to investigate the source of the late donation.
The Post reviewed thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits, and spoke to more than two dozen people who knew about the investigation.
They report that an investigation began in 2017 after it was learned that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 election campaign.
Federal investigators only discovered in 2019 that nearly $10 million in cash was withdrawn on behalf of an organization linked to Egyptian intelligence. At the time, they were trying to prove if any money was moved from Egypt to Trump, and if that had anything to do with Trump’s decision to boost his campaign in its final days with $10 million of "his own money."
That claim alone should have set off alarms, because Donald Trump never spends his own money on anything.
However, Bill Barr blocked FBI agents and prosecutors from accessing Trump's bank records, which could have provided the evidence. In the fall of 2019, Barr questioned whether or not there were "sufficient grounds" for the investigation to continue.
I don't know, I think crimes against the United States are always worth investigating, but I digress.
Read the full report here.