Egypt Bars Son of Ray LaHood From Leaving the Country CAIRO - The Egyptian authorities have blocked the son of a United States cabinet member and several other American employees of a Washington-backed nongovernmental organization from leaving Egypt in an apparent escalation of a politically charged criminal investigation into foreign-funded groups promoting democracy. Officials of the group, the International Republican Institute, said the Egyptian authorities had blocked its Cairo chief, Sam LaHood, from boarding a flight at the airport last week. His father is Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. Officials of the group said Egyptian legal authorities told them a few other American employees had been barred from travel outside the country as well. It was unclear how many other Americans working at similar groups may also be banned from travel. The episode comes at a tense moment in relations between Washington and Cairo. A year after a council of generals took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, Washington has begun publicly urging them to turn over authority to civilians as soon as possible. And legislators have begun agitating to put new conditions about the transition to democracy on the more than $3 billion a year in military aide that the United States sends Egypt, although the Obama administration has shown no inclination to allow such a move. Egypt's ruling military council, in turn, has been suggesting for months that the United States may have been funding nonprofit human rights and democracy building groups with an agenda to destabilize Egypt, part of a growing drumbeat of anti-Americanism that has emanated from the military-led government. The generals have often sought to blame outbursts of violence in the streets on such foreign interference. The military council has also kept in place Mubarak-era laws requiring any foreign funding of Egyptian nonprofit organizations to pass through the government and go only to licensed groups. The government rarely issues licenses to genuinely independent civil society groups, ensuring that almost all of them remain in a kind of legal twilight and vulnerable to prosecution - including the International Republican Institute and other American-backed groups. Since the ouster of Mr. Mubarak a year ago, the American government has begun providing some financing more directly to Egyptian nonprofit groups without going through the Egyptian government, acting in the expectation that Egypt's political transition meant a more open policy toward civil society groups. But several months ago, the military-led government launched a formal legal investigation into foreign funding of Egyptian nonprofits, and it culminated recently in raids by armed police squads who confiscated files, computers and money from several such groups, including the International Republican Institute and its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute. Both have close ties to the congressional leadership and work to promote the practice of electoral democracy in countries around the world. The raids ignited a new firestorm of criticism from both Congress and the United States State department. American officials, including Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and Ambassador Anne Patterson, both said they had received direct assurance from members of the ruling military council that it would end the raids and return the confiscated property. But officials of the government have subsequently defended the raids as a legitimate part of the investigation and said that no property would be returned until the inquiry was closed. President Obama has also brought the matter up in a telephone conversation with Egypt's acting head of state, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the White House said in a recent statement.