Federal prosecutors spent years investigating whether money flowed through an Egyptian state bank into the coffers of Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, CNN reports.
The report solves the long-running mystery over a grand jury subpoena that special counsel Robert Mueller litigated up to the Supreme Court in 2019, revealing that it had to do with compelling records from an Egyptian state-owned bank.
In the final days of the 2016 campaign, President Trump gave a $10 million burst of self-funding to his campaign.
Prosecutors were scrutinizing whether Trump himself financed that self-funding, or whether the money actually flowed to Trump via a state-owned bank in Egypt.
Whether the Egyptian government was itself the source of the funds, or whether the bank was another cut-out, remains unclear from the article.
But CNN reports that the Egypt investigation predated Mueller, and continued for a significant period afterwards.
The network reports that after the end of the Mueller probe, prosecutors attempted to subpoena President Trump’s banking records to solve the mystery. But then-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu denied the request.
The probe reportedly remained open until current acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. Michael Sherwin began a review of the case this past summer, and ordered it closed.
Egypt has flown under the radar as a potentially conflicting foreign tie of President Trump’s. Some noted in 2017 that Egypt was among the Muslim-majority countries exempted from the President’s travel ban.
Read the CNN report here.
