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By Sean O'Driscoll
Senior Crime and Courts Reporter
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There is no "smoking gun" to prove that Attorney General Bill Barr sabotaged an investigation into an alleged $10 million payment to Donald Trump, a legal analyst has said.
A Washington Post article claims that Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah el-Sissi Sisi, withdrew $10 million from a Cairo bank account to help fund Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
The August 2 article also strongly suggests that Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr, put an end to an investigation into the alleged payment by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington D.C.
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Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told Newsweek that it would be very difficult to prove a case against Barr as the attorney general has wide discretion on which cases to pursue.
"The problem is that absent smoking gun proof, it is near to impossible to identify an improper motive even if subordinates uniformly disagree with a decision."
"Furthermore, when on rare occasions courts do intrude, it will be to dismiss a case. They will not order a prosecutor to bring a case he chooses not to bring," Gillers said.
He added that prosecutors "have wide discretion to bring or drop prosecutions."
"There are not sufficient resources to prosecute every crime even when the proof is there. It is an executive branch decision whether to prosecute. The courts will not interfere," he said.
Some of the allegations were already publicly known. In the early part of the investigation, Trump spokesman Jason Miller rejected the allegation and said: "President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt."
The Cairo bank money, which made up a large portion of Egypt's U.S. currency reserves, was allegedly withdrawn in giant duffel bags and given to an Egyptian spy agency to pass onto Trump's campaign. This was after Sisi and Trump had a private meeting at the United Nations in September, 2016.
The Washington Post article says that, as president, Trump released $1 billion in military aid to Sisi's government.
The article suggests that Trump's Attorney General, Bill Barr, prevented the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington from investigating any further, after the office had obtained greater information from Cairo on the cash withdrawals.
Newsweek sought email comment from Trump's election campaign; former Attorney General, Bill Barr and the Egyptian embassy in Washington, D.C.
A source close to the Republican presidential nominee told Newsweek that the allegations were completely untrue.
"This is about the only claim more absurd than the Letitia James/Jack Smith insanity," they said, referring to the prosecution of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith for alleged election interference, alleged hoarding of presidential records and the lawsuit by New York attorney general, Letitia James, for Trump's fraudulent inflation of asset values. Trump denies wrongdoing in all cases.
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