The Biden administration is playing defense after Joe Biden followed the lead of Barack Obama, who once sent a plane with $400 million in cash to Iran (as part of a $1.7 billion total payment), and upped the ante, this time unfreezing $6 billion of their assets as part of a deal to freeze five Americans.
In the face of obvious concerns that Iran, a leading state sponsor of terrorism, may be about as responsible with those funds as the Taliban has been with the billions in weapons that Biden left behind in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is attempting to assure the American public that Iran will be using the funds for philanthropic purposes.
A reporter asked Blinken: "Mr. Secretary. Today you had a meeting with the GCC foreign minister, and this meeting came after the announcement of that. Did they raise concern regarding the release of frozen funds for the Iranian, and the possibility of using these funds to fund terrorism, whether in Lebanon, in Yemen, elsewhere? And if you can elaborate a little bit regarding the mechanism on how you would supervise and monitor the use of these funds for humanitarian purposes too.”
Blinken replied, in part, that “ Our problem, our profound problem, is with the Iranian regime. So from day one, these Iranian monies that were in a Korean bank have always been available to Iran to use for humanitarian purposes. But for a lot of technical reasons, they weren’t able to access those funds where they were, so the funds were moved to another bank where we have absolute oversight of how they – how they’re used, and they can only be used for humanitarian purposes.”
That a deal was even needed in the first place is itself an indictment of the Biden administration. Over four decades ago, the Iran hostage crisis was ended by the mere assumption of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and not a dollar had to be spent. What a difference strong leadership makes.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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