Hijazi and her coworkers were imprisoned on May 1, 2014 on child abuse and trafficking charges - accusations that were baseless, according to U.S. officials and human-rights workers - due to the lack of evidence.
When Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi visited President Trump at the White House earlier this month, officials said Hijazi's case would be among the topics of discussion between the two governments.
Meanwhile, a senior administration official said that no quid pro quo had been offered for Hijazi's release but that there had been "assurance from the highest levels (of Sisi's government) that whatever the verdict was, Egypt would use presidential authority to send her home".
Hijazi's husband and colleagues were also acquitted of their charges earlier this week. And despite calls for her release, the Obama administration seemed to have little leverage with the Sissi regime to make it happen.
The president met with a beaming Hijazi at the White House.
She was reportedly accompanied by her family and White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell, who had traveled to the region with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Here was a chance to highlight an important success, bringing home an American that the Obama administration could not.
Leafs are down but not out of tight series against Capitals
Brian Boyle , by far the Leafs most experienced post-season player , said the games only get harder as a series goes deeper. What's interesting about what's happened in this series is the pace of play has been dictated by the Leafs at 5-on-5.
DONALD TRUMP: President el-Sisi has been somebody that's been very close to me from the first time I've met him. You see it in the Geocities-like quality of Breitbart News' website and in the noisy, screenshots-of-screenshots-of-screenshots memes passed around Reddit and Twitter and in alt-right wannabe Mike Huckabee's increasingly unhinged and unfunny tweets which try and fuse the sick burns of online dragging culture with dad jokes ("Got haircut today;asked for the Kim Jung Un look; Barber refused-said it was unsafe to cut hair with a lawn mower", Huckabee tweeted earlier this month).
But it was apparently in the meeting after those comments that Trump mentioned Hijazi's detention to el-Sissi. -Egyptian citizen, and her Egyptian husband had established the Belady Foundation in Cairo to assist homeless children.
SIEGEL: You helped with the most recent release of Aya Hijazi.
"As you can imagine they're overjoyed, they're stunned", McMullen says. There has been a crackdown on a lot of civil society groups.
Since toppling President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in mid-2013, Sisi's government has cracked down on the opposition, killing hundreds of Brotherhood supporters and jailing thousands. After the coup, Obama withheld aid from Egypt - for decades, the second- largest recipient of USA military assistance, after Israel, at more than $1 billion a year. "President Donald J. Trump". In one memorable image from a hearing last month, she appeared in a different world altogether, lost in the pages of Maya Angelou's memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".
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