RCFP, Washington Post seek to unseal records related to special counsel investigation into allegations Egypt sought to fund 2016 Trump campaign
Update: After reviewing a declaration submitted by the government ex parte and under seal, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied the motion to unseal filed by the Reporters Committee and The Washington Post, “find[ing] that public disclosure of the information contained within the redacted portions of the Rosenstein Memo is not appropriate.”
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and The Washington Post are asking two federal district courts to unseal judicial records in separate closed matters that could help shed further light on allegations that Egypt sought to financially support the first presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
The unsealing effort follows The Post’s exclusive investigation published last month that revealed that federal investigators, including former special counsel Robert Mueller, led a secret criminal investigation looking into reports that “Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give [then-candidate] Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign,” and whether “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.”
The Post’s investigation, which is based on dozens of interviews and a review of thousands of pages of documents, raises pressing questions about why the federal probe into Egypt’s alleged effort to inject money into Trump’s campaign was closed under the Trump administration, why it remained dormant under the Biden administration, and what might have been found had it continued.
According to The Post’s story, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post by email, “[T]he investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed. None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact.”
The Reporters Committee and The Post, represented by attorneys at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, argue in court filings that additional information about the special counsel’s investigation is likely to be found in records that are currently filed under seal in two closed criminal cases: one in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the other in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In the first case, the Reporters Committee previously argued successfully to unseal redacted versions of certain records, leading to revelations that have informed news outlets’ reporting.
Given the new reporting from The Post and other news organizations — and the fact that the investigation is now closed — the Reporters Committee and The Post argue that there is an “overwhelming public interest” in unsealing additional records, stressing that doing so would shine a light on a matter “of grave and momentous national concern: a foreign nation’s potential bribery of, and illegal campaign contributions to, a presidential candidate who became president and who is running for that office again, and a failure of the Justice Department to follow the evidence wherever it led regarding these matters.”
A five-year fight for transparency
The unsealing effort by the Reporters Committee and The Post in D.C. federal district court concerns records related to contempt proceedings that were previously shrouded in complete secrecy.
After Mueller was appointed as special counsel, it was widely believed that his investigation into foreign government interference in the 2016 election focused exclusively on Russia. But information about the Egypt investigation first began to emerge when the special counsel initiated contempt proceedings in the D.C. District Court involving an unidentified company owned by an unidentified country.
The company had been subpoenaed in 2018 to produce information to a grand jury and was found in contempt and fined after declining to do so. The majority of the court records related to the contempt proceedings were sealed, which prompted the Reporters Committee to file motions to unseal to bring more information to the public. Those motions, which were filed in the district court as well as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, ultimately led to the release of redacted briefs and transcripts from the court proceedings, including a filing that identified the law firm representing the corporation challenging the contempt order.
However, the district court declined to go further, noting in an April 2019 decision that the “underlying grand jury investigation is ongoing,” and observing that “the need for secrecy is heightened during an ongoing investigation and warrants redactions to preserve grand jury secrecy.” The D.C. Circuit later agreed.
It wasn’t until this past June that the D.C. District Court released less redacted versions of some of the records it had previously ordered unsealed more than five years earlier. The more lightly redacted materials shed additional light on the underlying grand jury investigation and the contempt proceeding, including that the corporation’s personnel are located in Cairo, Egypt.
In the Eastern District of Virginia, the related unsealing effort by the Reporters Committee and The Post concerns a document previously filed under seal in the government’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager: a 2017 memo written by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein setting out the authorized scope of the special counsel’s investigation into foreign interference in the election.
The U.S. Department of Justice released a less-redacted version of the memo in May 2020.
Motions to unseal
The Reporters Committee and The Post argue that the veil of secrecy in both cases should finally be lifted.
As they state in their motions to unseal, not only is the Egypt investigation now closed but additional information about it has come to light in recent years. In 2020, for example, CNN reported a number of previously unknown facts about the investigation underlying the contempt proceeding against the corporation, including that the corporation was an “Egyptian state-owned bank.”
And last month, The Post’s investigation revealed substantially more information, including never-before-reported details about the trail the $10 million took after leaving Egypt, the years investigators spent examining whether the funds were transferred to Trump, and the Trump administration’s oversight of the “politically sensitive” investigation.
For its story, The Post’s journalists spoke with representatives of the Egyptian government, the Department of Justice, and former President Trump. In addition to confirming the existence of the investigation, The Post reported that they also confirmed that it had been closed with no charges being brought.
In both cases, the Reporters Committee and The Post are asking the courts to unseal previously redacted information pertaining to the Egypt investigation, arguing that doing so would both provide the public with a more complete picture of the investigation, and help assure the public that the government pursued and ultimately closed it in an impartial manner.
“In a democratic system that relies on transparency to ensure its legitimacy, such deep uncertainty derived from ongoing secrecy threatens to erode public confidence in our institutions,” attorneys for the Reporters Committee and The Post wrote in a brief in support of their motion in the D.C. federal district court. “And that threat is especially acute where, as here, the investigation involves a former president who is again pursuing the nation’s highest office.”
Read The Post’s full investigation.
Read the latest filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:
Read the latest filings in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia: