National Review’s Zach Kessel reports that GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley is urging the Biden administration to freeze the $6 billion it caused to be released to Qatar for the benefit of Iran. That would be great if it were possible, but is it? It’s not clear how.
To be clear, this was not U.S. money. It was money our government was in a position to freeze because of our significant influence over international banking and because, at the time, the Trump administration was enforcing stringent sanctions on Iran as part of its “maximum pressure” campaign.
President Trump’s gambit succeeded in starving Iran of funds (as Elliott Abrams observes in his superb piece on Iran-backed Hamas’s atrocious weekend attacks in Israel). Alas, President Biden reversed it. Biden knew full well that Iran uses increased revenues to fund anti-American and anti-Israeli jihadism, but he empowers the regime nonetheless in his reckless quest to entice Iran back into the dreadful Obama/Biden Iran nuclear deal.
Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from this “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA) in 2018 — and rightly so, the only real question being what took him so long. Biden is intent on reviving it, in part because he was one of its biggest proponents, and in part because the default Democratic position is to be for anything Trump was against, and vice versa.
The $6 billion now at issue was generated by Iranian oil exports to South Korea. The sanctions and influence over the banking system enabled our government to freeze it in place — in South Korea. But Biden gave up that leverage in order to pay ransom to Tehran for the release of five American captives — a move maddeningly similar to the Obama/Biden administration’s furtive payment of a cash ransom to Tehran’s jihadist regime to secure its agreement to the JCPOA (as if the Iran-empowering terms of the deal were not alluring enough).
Unbelievably, the Biden administration chose September 11 as the date to waive its authority to stop the transfer of funds to Iran (whose role in the 9/11 attacks was never fully investigated — or, at least, made public). Iran released the hostages a few days later. The money is now said to sit in a bank in Doha, for Iran’s benefit but under the control of the Qatari government. At the time, the Biden administration said this arrangement enabled the U.S. to “monitor” the funds and to have “some control” over when and how Iran spent the funds.
It is not at all clear, however, that our government has any meaningful control. The money is now in Qatar’s possession; the ability of the U.S. to control it ended with Biden’s waiver. Iran has already performed its part of Biden’s bargain — it released the hostages — and it denies that the Biden administration has any capacity to dictate how Iran spends its funds. Add to the mix that, besides its cozy relationship with Iran, Qatar is a longtime financial backer of Hamas, and even harbors the Hamas leadership, which orchestrated this weekend’s atrocities. The thought that Qatar would use whatever leverage it may have over the funds in order to penalize Iran for doing what Qatar itself does — namely, materially support Hamas’s jihadist terrorism — is laughable.
It is good that former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is all over this issue. It is imperative that congressional Republicans press the administration for details regarding what, if any, control the Biden administration has maintained over billions of dollars the president paid in ransom — in contravention of U.S. policy and under circumstances where, after Biden’s action provided a powerful incentive for jihadists to take Americans captive, Hamas has now done just that — in addition to murdering at least eleven Americans because they happened to be Jews. Nevertheless, I would be very surprised if the Biden administration kept any meaningful control over the money, much less maintained the capacity to freeze it, seize it, or redirect it (as Haley suggests it should be redirected to Israel).
I would reiterate, moreover, what I contended yesterday. The $6 billion ransom payment, while appalling, is just a small part of the material support Biden has provided to the “Death to America” jihadist regime in Tehran. What has turbo-charged Iran’s facilitation of international terrorism is Biden’s easing of sanctions, which has caused its oil production, exports, and revenue to skyrocket. When Iran has more money, jihadists have more resources. And Biden knows that.