“He is the dumbest cluck I ever met,” Mr. Kerry told his chief of staff as they left the presidential palace. “I will not let my country go down the drain,” General Sisi told Mr. Kerry, as he later recalled to me. He knew then that “Morsi was cooked.” General Sisi was prepared to intervene. In an encrypted email, she warned at least some in the White House that “if not imminent, a coup was a high likelihood within a few months,” one official told me. The White House was sending Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel talking points intended to warn General Sisi that Washington would punish a coup.

Source: New York Times July 27, 2018 09:58 UTC