House Democrats are asking former President Donald Trump to prove he never received money from the Egyptian government after The Washington Post reported a $10 million withdrawal from the country’s state-run bank right before Trump took office in 2017.
In a letter released Tuesday, Reps. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., requested that Trump immediately provide evidence “that you never, directly or indirectly, politically or personally, received any fund from the Egyptian president or government,” The Post reported.
The lawmakers, who serve on the House Oversight Committee, requested that Trump provide any information about a $10 million sum put into his campaign in late 2016. As they are a minority in the House, Democrats do not have the authority to issue subpoenas.
“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president, and a current candidate for president, took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the letter reads.
The letter states that it was written in response to a previous article from The Post that revealed a secret Department of Justice investigation into whether Trump accepted an illegal donation from Egypt that contributed to his 2016 presidential campaign. According to The Post, federal investigators received classified information that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi wanted to contribute to Trump’s presidential campaign; the two had met earlier in the 2016 campaign at the United Nations, with Trump praising the dictator as a “fantastic guy.” The investigators later learned the National Bank of Egypt withdrew $9,998,000 on Jan. 15, 2017, just days before Trump became president.
Around the same time, Trump gave his own campaign $10 million.
The Trump campaign is rejecting any suggestion the former president would accept support from a foreign government, a spokesperson telling The Post its reporting was “textbook fake news.”
“None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said.