Looks like we finally got our answer:
For more than three years, federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
www.cnn.com
Mystery court fight
The Egypt investigation also led to one of the most secretive court proceedings in Washington in years.
Until now, the case was only known to be a fight over a grand jury subpoena between the Mueller team and a foreign government-owned company.
But CNN has learned the case was a fight over records from an Egyptian national bank.
In July 2018, the Mueller team issued a secret grand jury subpoena for records to the Egyptian bank --
sparking a months-long court fight that only gradually became public as it progressed through the court system.
Soon enough, the bank was arguing it shouldn't have to give Mueller records because it was interchangeable with the foreign government that owned it. The US courts disagreed repeatedly, saying the company couldn't be immune from the Mueller team subpoena.
At the time, the courts and Mueller's team took extreme caution to keep the matter confidential. One judge, Beryl Howell of the DC District Court,
wrote that the case dealt with "foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion in those efforts by American citizens."
The fight was so
closely guarded that it took months for the names of lawyers involved to emerge, only becoming public first through CNN reporting then confirmed by court records.
Attorneys who represented the bank in the subpoena fight and a representative from their law firm, Alston & Bird, did not respond to CNN's inquiries for this story.
When the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, heard arguments in the case in December 2018, security cleared journalists from an entire floor of the federal courthouse, allowing attorneys involved in the case to enter and exit the building and the courtroom without being seen.
CNN, however,
spotted Mueller team prosecutors, including Ahmad, returning to the special counsel's office minutes after the hearing ended.
The case even landed before the Supreme Court
in early 2019. The high court
ultimately declined the company's bid to block Mueller's subpoena in March 2019.
Even then, however, the standoff between US prosecutors and the Egyptian bank ended in a stalemate.
The bank had handed over almost 1,000 pages of documents to prosecutors, translated into English, according to redacted court records that were eventually released after the Mueller investigation concluded. But that didn't satisfy prosecutors, either in the Mueller investigation or the DC US attorney's office.
The
bank's lawyers professed it had "gone to great lengths to find and voluntarily produce documents responsive to the subpoena."
"What more could the Special Counsel want?" they asked, according to court transcripts.
The federal investigators told the court they believed there must be more, and even the judge acknowledged gaps in the bank's records.
In the end, it was the bank's word against the investigators. The court proceedings ended with prosecutors getting nothing more than what the bank was willing to turn over, and the bank was excused from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that had accrued for defying the subpoena.
It appeared to be a dead end -- and not justification enough for Mueller to keep his office open to finish this case alone.