Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee were outraged that President Donald Trump lifted sanctions on Russia.
There are just two problems with that: he didn’t lift sanctions. And the policy they’re slamming began under President Joe Biden.
“While both parties in Congress push to tighten sanctions, Trump signals—again—whose side he’s on,” the official account for the Democrats on the House Affairs Committee posted on X Monday. “He won’t hold Russia accountable. Congress must.”
The account was referencing a general license renewal from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which allows certain Russian banks to temporarily operate without sanctions. The post did not mention that the license is a continuation of a policy implemented by the Biden administration in December 2024, and renewed again in January 2025 — weeks before Trump took office.
A Treasury Department spokesman confirmed to The Daily Wire that the general license is not a sanctions rollback, but an extension of an earlier measure.
“The Trump administration has not lifted sanctions; all sanctions remain in effect, and there has been no change to our sanctions policy in regard to Russia,” the spokesperson said. “This general license is a continuation of a general license initially granted in 2024 under the Biden administration.”
A Republican spokesman for the committee called the Democrats’ post attacking Trump “verifiably false” in a statement to The Daily Wire.
“We are not taking pressure off of Russia, and these licenses were greenlit under Biden,” the spokesperson said. “Democrats are still grasping for anything to lie about President Trump’s record on Russia.”
The spokesman added that “Democrats lying about President Trump for a few clicks does nothing to end the bloodshed in Ukraine.”
The Democrats’ House Foreign Affairs Committee has not yet deleted the post. But a Democrat spokesman for the committee backtracked in a statement to The Daily Wire, claiming that the Trump administration is “carving out exceptions.”
“Unfortunately, the Administration appears more focused on carving out exceptions to existing sanctions than on imposing new ones, despite strong bipartisan support in Congress for a policy of strength,” the spokesman said.
They added that Ranking Member Gregory Meeks drafted Section 307 of his Ukraine Support Act “to explicitly block this general license — regardless of which President issued it.”
“Ranking Member Meeks’ position is clear and consistent: he supports additional sanctions on Russia to defund Putin’s war machine,” the spokesperson said.
The general license was implemented by the outgoing Biden administration to give Trump leverage in negotiating between Russia and Ukraine.
A former senior advisor for OFAC under the Biden administration also concluded that the Trump administration did not lift sanctions.
“This is not a lifting of any sanctions — it simply extends a general license that was previously in place,” Brad Brooks-Rubin, a former Senior Advisor in the Office of Sanctions Coordination at the U.S. Department of State, told the Kyiv Post.
The June 27 general license extension temporarily permits 13 major Russian financial institutions involved in civilian nuclear energy transactions to continue operating without sanctions.