Even after the 2015 nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic went into effect, certain sanctions remained in place. The Associated Press reported this week that the Obama White House tried to help Tehran avoid them, until American banks refused to participate. Sohrab Ahmari comments:
[In 2016,] the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord. . . . The Obama administration, [to make the currency conversion possible], pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system; the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury. . . .
[At the same time], the Obama administration reassured the public and lawmakers that Tehran would “continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market,” i.e., the U.S., as then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified before Congress in July 2015, shortly after the nuclear deal was signed. That was a lie. And it would be repeated by other Obama officials.
So much for liberals’ supposed Wilsonian commitment to “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” A better way to describe subterfuge and secrecy objectively aimed at enriching an enemy of the United States would be to call it—oh, what’s the word?—collusion.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/iran/anything-for-the-ayatollah/