Add Bribery to the List

Let’s talk about that $10 million from Egypt

This has not worked out well for us.

Donald Trump once said that Americans, if we were reckless enough to put him in the White House, would get tired of winning. Because he led the worst, most losing administration in American history, we were never able to find out if that was true.

Besides, his statement was absurd because people who are actually winners know that there is no such thing as getting tired of winning.

As a lifelong and inveterate criminal, he certainly knows that people who are really good at committing crimes don’t get tired of that either. The list of his crimes and transgressions is far too long to repeat here (we’d have to go back to the 1970s), so let’s stick to the most recent: In the last year, Donald has been adjudicated a rapist and business fraud and, less than three months ago, he was convicted of 34 felonies.

So why not add bribery to his bucket list? It has recently come to light that Donald accepted $10 million from Egypt shortly after the election in 2016. As The Washington Post recently reported, “Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to ‘kindly withdraw’ nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.”

That sounds totally legitimate,

The Post further reported that the discovery of the $10 million withdrawal

intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign.

The Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.

And that totally tracks if you believe in coincidences.

Of course, Bill Barr, Donald’s Attorney General, stepped in and blocked prosecutors and FBI agents from obtaining bank records that might serve as corroboration. 

So, what did Donald do for Egypt in exchange for $10 million? As the Post reported, while he was in the White House, he “shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called ‘my favorite dictator.’” 

In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United States had been withholding over human rights abuses — a move that had been opposed by his first secretary of state — followed by the release of $1.2 billion more in such assistance.

It looks like Sisi got his money’s worth out of Donald. And, as usual, the American people got sold out.

Donald’s corrupt dealings with adversarial foreign governments isn’t new. It’s been obvious for a very long time that his relationship with Russia and Saudi Arabia are about lining his own pockets at the expense of American interests. He was impeached for trying to extort Ukraine in order to help his reelection campaign. And his son-in-law, Jared Kushner received $2 billion from Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia shortly after leaving the White House—either for services rendered or services to be rendered. We don’t yet know.

While the corrupt illegitimate super-majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has essentially decided that Donald can do whatever he wants with impunity, America’s founders actually took a quite dim view of government officials who accepted bribes. As Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch recently pointed out in a column about the suspicious Egyptian withdrawals:

 The impeachment clause of the U.S. Constitution spells out bribery as first on its list of things for which a corrupt president or other federal official can be removed from office, ahead of treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

In case that was too ambiguous, the framers also wrote up the emoluments clause, using an anachronistic term to essentially bar the president and other officeholders from accepting gifts or payments from foreign countries or their rulers.

The emoluments clause is the mechanism through which Donald should have been prevented from lining his pockets with Chinese and Saudi money when he was in the White House when he was running a hotel that attracted foreign actors seeking advantage with his administration. 

If there’s one thing we should know by now, it’s that as bad as Donald already is, he can always get worse. Given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, Donald knows that if he can manage to get back to the White House, he will be above the law—free to accept bribes, break laws, and seek vengeance on his enemies. With that kind of incentive, we can be sure he will stop at nothing.

The Egyptian bribery scandal is the kind of thing that used to land people in jail. Now, because for years now the corporate media have convinced itself and tried to convince the reast of us that all of Donald’s worst qualities and transgressions are already “baked in,” it’s barely a blip on the national news media’s radar. So, we need to stand up and say it’s unacceptable.

This November, we can remind the world’s dictators, and our own homegrown wannabe dictators, that America is not for sale—even if my uncle is.