Obama Secretly Lifted Financial Sanctions, Asked American Banks to Help Iran Convert Its Currency to Dollars, to Further Bend Over for the Mullahs

Via Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, AP reports that Obama secretly gave Iran permission to begin moving its money through the banking system, despite sanctions forbidding it to do so.

Obama did this, of course, to try to appease the Iranians into accepting the billions he intended to give them for nothing.

He also did this while denying he was doing it.

Now, the Iranians did not get to move their money around. Banks feared that this was illegal (which it probably was) and did not imagine that they, like Obama, would be immune from the law. So the banks balked, and Iran was unable to move its money.

But Obama did give the Iranians permission to do this.

He had a pen and phone, you know.

The Obama administration secretly sought to give Iran access --albeit briefly -- to the U.S. financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so.

...

The report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed that under President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department issued a license in February 2016, never previously disclosed, that would have allowed Iran to convert $5.7 billion it held at a bank in Oman from Omani rials into euros by exchanging them first into U.S. dollars. If the Omani bank had allowed the exchange without such a license, it would have violated sanctions that bar Iran from transactions that touch the U.S. financial system.

The effort was unsuccessful because American banks -- themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions -- declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion, the report said, but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.

"The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran," said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee's chairman.

Jazz Shaw reminds his readers of this event:

You may recall last December when we learned that Obama had drained all resources from Operation Casandra, a plan to shut down a Hezbollah cocaine smuggling operation for fear of "rocking the boat" with Tehran and upsetting the nuclear deal. Just how many of these "side arrangements" were going on that the American people never learned about so they could get the steaming pile of Iranian diplomacy over the finish line?

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:33 PM

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