How Bill Barr Killed Secret Probe on Whether Egypt Paid Trump Millions

The Egyptian government may have given $10 million to Donald Trump in 2017, violating U.S. law—but the investigation into the payment was squashed by Attorney General William Barr.

The Washington Post reports, citing unnamed sources, that an investigation began in 2017 that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi was seeking to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 election campaign. Federal investigators discovered in 2019 that, only five days before Trump was sworn into office, nearly $10 million in cash was withdrawn on behalf of an organization linked to Egyptian intelligence.

In the U.S., receiving funds from overseas is a federal crime. Federal investigators were trying to prove if any money actually 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.

But the investigation was halted by Trump’s Justice Department, which blocked FBI agents and prosecutors from accessing bank records that could provide the evidence. In the fall of 2019, Barr questioned whether there were sufficient grounds for the investigation to continue.

Barr directed the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., Jessie Liu, to examine the intelligence herself, and instructed FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr said were “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records. Whether Wray (also appointed by Trump) did anything in response isn’t known, but in June 2020, the prosecutor Barr chose to oversee the investigation, Michael Sherwin, closed it down, citing insufficient evidence.

“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the Post’s sources. “The Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads—it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not.”

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. It’s a startling report, considering that Trump had faced a special counsel probe into his relationship with the Russian government, but not Egypt.

In recent months, Senator Bob Menendez was convicted of taking bribes of cash and gold bars while acting as a middleman between New Jersey businessmen and foreign governments, including Egypt. If Trump actually took money from Egypt, it would show a much higher level of corruption from the country as well as from Trump, who has yet to face any criminal sentences from the legal cases against him. But, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidents immunity from “official acts,” if Trump actually took money illegally, can anything be done about it?

Donald Trump almost didn’t take the stage at the National Association of Black Journalists conference earlier this week because he was terrified of being fact-checked.

The former president appeared on stage Wednesday more than an hour late to take part in a conversation moderated by ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and Semafor’s political reporter Kadia Goba.

Trump quickly complained about the delayed start, saying it had taken half an hour for the NABJ to get their sound equipment to work. Apparently, he was trying to get ahead of something else.

While there were some audio problems, “the bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage when he had agreed to go on. He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” NABJ president Ken Lemon told Axios in a story published Friday.

The NABJ had arranged for Trump’s interview to be simultaneously fact-checked online in collaboration with Politifact. At one point, Trump’s team requested that the NABJ not post fact-checking to its social media accounts, or allow the moderator to discuss the fact-checking on stage, according to Lemon.

“Our whole team stood our ground,” Lemon told Axios.

At one point, things got desperate. “I was prepared to go on stage to craft a statement, saying he decided not to go on stage because of fact-checking.... [W]e couldn’t compromise on that,” Lemon said.

But as Lemon drafted his statement, Trump finally walked on stage, Lemon said.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Axios a different story. He said that Trump’s team waited “for close to 40 minutes while audio/technical issues were fixed by NABJ.”

Trump used his contentious appearance to launch racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, including questioning her race as the crowd booed him.

Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, gushed to NOTUS Thursday, lauding Trump for being so brave about the whole event. “He actually goes into hostile audiences, he answers tough questions, he pushes back against them, but he actually answers them, and how nice it is to have an American leader who’s not afraid to go into hostile places and actually answer some tough questions,” Vance said.

However, it’s clear Trump is distinctly unwilling to go into hostile audiences, and was left scrambling for a way to back out when he knew his words would be held to account. His team ended up cutting off the event, which was scheduled to last an hour, after just 34 minutes. If his seething response to ABC’s Scott is any indication, Trump can’t take a tough question at all.

Vice President Kamala Harris has shattered campaign fundraising expectations, bringing in a whopping $310 million in July, more than double Donald Trump’s $137 million.

Harris took over President Biden’s campaign operation after he decided to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election less than two weeks ago, spurring the floodgates to open. The Democratic campaign has $377 million in cash on hand, $50 million more than the Trump campaign, Politico reports.

The Biden-Harris campaign has also cracked the $1 billion mark with four months left until the election, the quickest campaign to do that in history, they said on Friday.

Trump had successful fundraising months after his hush-money felony convictions in May, causing him to catch up to Biden. After Biden’s poor showing in June’s presidential debate, the president’s fundraising started to dry up from both small donors and major ones. Some even stopped their donations to pressure Biden to withdraw from the race.

But after Harris entered the race, small donors rushed to donate, with two-thirds of July’s donations coming from first-time donors. Several Zoom calls, such as White Dudes for Harris and Black Women for Harris, raised more than $20 million.

Harris’s rise has caught the Trump campaign off guard, and they have no idea how to deal with her. She has erased his polling advantage in several swing states. And Trump, who usually has insults and nicknames at the ready, is struggling to respond to Harris calling him and his running mate “weird.”

But will these positive numbers, along with the good vibes, be enough? Harris will announce her own running mate soon, and her pick can’t be one that alienates Democrats and stunts her momentum. If she chooses well, Democrats will be looking to November with optimism.

On Thursday evening, at-large Houston City councilwoman Letitia Plummer announced that she’s seeking the nomination for the late Sheila Jackson Lee’s congressional seat. If elected, Plummer would become the first Muslim woman to represent Texas in Congress.

Jackson Lee held Texas’s gerrymandered-to-hell 18th district—contorted into the shape of a partially eaten donut to encompass Houston’s mostly Black and brown north—for the better part of 30 years, and was arguably one of Texas’s more progressive legislators. When she died of pancreatic cancer in mid-July, it didn’t take long for those waiting in the wings to announce intentions to replace her. In a statement, Plummer wrote that she plans on “continuing [Jackson Lee’s] tradition of robust and unapologetic advocacy.”

Plummer, a dentist by trade, touted her support from labor and her City Hall record focusing on “quality of life issues” for underserved communities—a common touchstone for Houston politicians, given the repeated and intensifying environmental crises plaguing the city. When asked, she also said she would support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and oppose all military funding to Israel, a major departure from her predecessor. “I do believe I would be the only one [in this race] that would take that level of hard stance,” she told The New Republic. “I obviously am against any level of terrorism, but we cannot continue to kill innocent people.” Two hours after this article was published, she backtracked, saying she didn’t hear the full question, and clarified that she believed Israel needed military support for defense and “release of the hostages and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire are both necessary.” *

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has yet to call for a special election for Jackson Lee’s seat, so instead, per Texas law, the race will be decided in a few weeks by just 88 Democratic Party precinct chairs representing parts of the 18th congressional district, a truncated process meant to fill the seat in a crunch. In seeking the party’s nomination, Plummer has chosen her words carefully so as not to jeopardize her current city hall position; local precedent says officeholders can technically “seek” the nomination to become the party’s candidate but can’t “announce his or her candidacy,” which would trigger the state constitution’s provision for automatic resignation. Adding Plummer to the list brings the total number of potential nominees up to five, with likely more to come.

Foremost among the potential nominees is Houston’s former mayor Sylvester Turner, a Bloomberg type, who on July 23 told a local TV station he was “seriously considering” throwing his hat in the ring before quickly backtracking—deeming it may be in bad taste to campaign before Jackson Lee’s funeral. Plummer, Turner’s erstwhile adversary in city hall, described her potential nomination in opposition to his: “Although his intentions may be good, I believe that this position not only needs someone that can carry on the legacy [of Jackson Lee] but also can create a new vision for CD-18, and I’m the only candidate, in comparison obviously, that has the record of doing the work in the overarching community,” she told The New Republic.

When Turner was mayor, it was not uncommon for him and Plummer to butt heads on environmental justice and housing issues. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Turner refused to pass an eviction grace period for tenants, which Plummer and other advocates said would have given people more time to scrap together the funds to remain housed. Where much of City Hall typically erred toward silence, lest they draw ire from the mayor who until recently completely controlled the council’s agenda, Plummer made a habit of publicly dissenting. By the time he finally brought a grace period ordinance to council in late February 2021, thousands had been evicted. (It apparently took bad press from Good Morning America about a Houston teenager using her college savings on keeping her mom housed to compel him to do so.)

Under Houston’s new mayor, the conservative Democrat John Whitmire, Plummer has maintained a similar role, but she asserted that, compared to Turner, she has a better relationship with Whitmire, who frequently blames his predecessor for the city’s longstanding problems. “We all are very clear on the relationship the previous mayor and the current mayor have, and I think that someone in the CD-18 seat really has to have a good working relationship at the municipal level.”

Jackson Lee was a Houston institution; her office served as a kind of incubator for a generation of local politicians. Amanda Edwards, Jackson Lee’s only competitive opponent in this spring’s primary, was once her intern; so, too, was Isaiah Martin, the flash-in-the-pan Gen Z candidate who entered the race for the 18th congressional district last year and, per The Intercept, “ignored his generation’s priorities” before soon after dropping out.

But Turner, age 69, is an institution in his own right. With deep pockets and powerful allies, he’s maintained a decades-long career in politics, jumping from the state house to mayorship and now, possibly, to Congress. At this point, given his long standing relationships with many of the district’s precinct chairs, it’s Turner’s race to lose. As the Houston Landing wrote, this process has long been, in essence, a coronation for powerful local leaders. But Plummer asserted it’s time to “look at things from a different perspective.” In less than a month, we’ll see if the Harris County Democratic Party agrees.

* This article has been updated with further information from Plummer on her views on military funding to Israel.

A female boxer who has competed as a woman her whole life is now accused of being transgender by the ultimate experts: right-wing U.S. politicians and influencers.

At the Paris Olympics on Thursday, Imane Khelif of Algeria defeated her opponent after only 46 seconds, when Italy’s Angela Carini stopped the fight and forfeited the match. Then the rumors started flying, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator J.D. Vance wrongfully called Khelif a “man” and somehow made it about Democrats.

“A real women [sic], Angela Carini, who trained for years to box at the Olympics is ‘defeated’ by a real man pretending to be a woman. HE is a fraud, an imposter, and a liar,” wrote Greene. “Democrats support this.”

Vance, who is also the Republican vice presidential nominee, was quick to try to somehow blame the nonissue on the Democratic presidential candidate. “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it,” he weighed in.

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, was quick to join the fray. “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Khelif was born female and has always competed as a woman—including at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, where she lost in the quarterfinals. Despite hearsay, there is no evidence that she identifies as transgender or intersex.

Other trans-exclusionary radical feminists and right-wingers also tried to pile on for their 15 minutes of fame, including author J.K. Rowling and YouTuber Logan Paul.

“So punching a woman in the face is apparently ok as long as the man doing it says he’s a woman and it’s at the Olympics,” wrote Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok.

The politicians and people elevating this conspiracy are quite literally putting Khelif’s life in danger. Her home country of Algeria does not recognize the rights of LGBTQ people, there is no legal recognition of transgender people, and some queer people are even jailed simply for their sexuality.

Right-wingers are citing an incident last year when the boxer was disqualified by the International Boxing Association after failing an unspecified gender-eligibility test. Some alleged that Khelif has heightened testosterone or XY chromosomes. Cisgender women can naturally have both of those things. Khelif has previously called her disqualification last year a “conspiracy.”

The International Olympic Committee tried (weakly) to come to Khelif’s defense. “I should make this absolutely clear for everyone; this isn’t a transgender issue. I think there has been some misreporting on this,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams. The IOC does not recognize the IBA as the governing body over Olympic boxing.

To be clear, there are no transgender women competing in any Olympic sports this year. However, there is actually a transgender male boxer: Hergie Bacyadan of the Philippines, who was forced to compete in the women’s division, his assigned gender at birth, and lost. However, you won’t hear about that, since it doesn’t fit the far right’s narrative.