NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {C} ontrary to Biden-administration spin, to media repetition of same, and thus to popular belief, the $6 billion as to which President Biden waived sanctions — on September 11 of all days — so that it could be transferred to Qatar for Iran’s benefit has not been “refrozen.”
Commentators should stop saying that the Biden administration, under pressure from Republicans and other critics, got Qatar to accept a rescission of the waiver and deny Iran access to the funds. It’s not true.
To recap, the $6 billion was generated by Iranian oil sales to South Korea. Biden’s ability to freeze the money so it would be inaccessible to Iran ended when he formally waived the sanctions. At that point, the $6 billion was transferred from South Korea, which had been honoring the sanctions, to Iran’s close ally, Qatar — with the explicit understanding that the sanctions were no longer applicable.
The new arrangement was that Qatar would possess the funds and manage their disbursement. Iran would not have access to the money in the sense of possessing it. Instead, Tehran would ask Doha to draw on the funds to make direct payments to third-party (non–Iranian government) suppliers of humanitarian goods and services. The United States would monitor these transactions to satisfy itself that the disbursements were for legitimate, humanitarian purposes and that Iran was not redirecting the funds to unapproved or nefarious purposes. But this was a political arrangement: The Biden administration could protest if it disapproved of a disbursement, but there is no indication that the U.S. had the authority to halt any disbursement that Qatar decided to make on Iran’s behalf.
To summarize again: Biden had the authority to halt disbursements by keeping the $6 billion frozen in South Korea; he forfeited that authority when he ceded control to Qatar.
Late last week, Biden deputy Treasury secretary Wally Adeyemo trumpeted what he portrayed as a revised understanding between the U.S. and Qatar that would stop Iran from benefitting from Biden’s transfer of the funds. As I observed at the time, however, this announcement, when closely parsed, marked no real change in the status quo. What Adeyemo said, in the Post’s words (my italics), was that the U.S. and Qatar had “agreed to stop Iran from accessing” the $6 billion. But as recounted above, it had always been agreed that Iran would not have access to the funds in the sense of possessing them. The question was whether Qatar would still be able to spend the funds for Iran’s benefit.
Since money is fungible, if Iran could still get Qatar to draw on the $6 billion from Biden to pay for humanitarian goods and services that Iran would otherwise have to buy with funds it controls, then Iran could repurpose those otherwise allocated funds to terrorism. It would therefore only be accurate for Biden to claim the money had been refrozen if Qatar had agreed to return it to a bank account the United States controlled, or if Qatar had made an enforceable agreement not to disburse any portion of the $6 billion absent prior American approval.
There is no evidence that Qatar agreed to any such thing.
Tellingly, in the initial coverage in the Post, and in later reporting by the New York Times repeating the Biden administration storyline that Qatar was joining the U.S. to “deny Iran access to $6 Billion from prisoner deal” (to quote the Times headline), there was no quoted statement from any Qatari official asserting that Qatar had agreed to change the original arrangement.
According to the Times, at a meeting with House Democrats, Adeyemo had said that Iran would “no longer have access” to the funds. That’s a red herring — to repeat, Iran was not supposed to have “access” in the first place. The Biden official also told Democrats that the money was supposedly “under close supervision and strict conditions that it only be used for humanitarian purposes.” Again, that’s just a regurgitation of the original deal; it does not deny that Qatar has control of the funds and can disburse them at Iran’s direction.
Obviously realizing this, the Times buries this paragraph in its story:
The Treasury Department, which oversees the funds, is not employing sanctions powers to formally freeze the money but has what was described as a quiet understanding with Qatar that Iran will be unable to retrieve it.
Right: Biden is “not employing sanctions powers to formally freeze the money” because it has no such powers over money it has already surrendered to Qatar. All Biden has is a non-enforceable understanding with Iran’s close ally, Qatar.
On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a joint news conference with Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, who doubles as prime minister and foreign minister (much as the al-Thani “royal family” doubles as a governing regime in Doha and a hotelier in London’s ritzy West End). Asked directly about “media reports [that] talk about an agreement . . . to freeze around six billion dollars for Iran here in Qatar,” Sheikh Mohammed served up this word-salad response:
Regarding the media reports about freezing Iranian funds in Qatar, the state of Qatar is always committed to any agreement, and every step must be done through consultations with other partners that fund – the money here in Qatar, is there. And Qatar will focus at the priorities of — need not do anything that will escalate the situation in the region.
The sheikh spoke in Arabic, so some of the incoherence probably owes to a halting translation. But what he appears to have said is that Qatar has the money and is agreeing to consult “with other partners” involved — meaning both the United States and Iran. Qatar’s “priority,” the minister sort of explained, is to avoid steps that would “escalate” tensions. Nevertheless, he did not say the money would stay frozen or that any Iranian requests for its disbursement would be denied. He certainly did not say that Qatar had ceded authority over the money to the United States.
Blinken was standing right there as Sheikh Mohammed spoke. He could easily have clarified, if it were true, that the $6 billion was frozen and that the United States had control over it. Not surprisingly, though, Blinken demurred. The money is not frozen, and the U.S. does not control it. Had the secretary said otherwise, al-Thani would have corrected him — lest he risk Tehran’s wrath. So Blinken decided the better part of valor was to stay mute now and resume spinning later.
In a stroke of luck for the Biden administration, the clown show that is the House Republican conference has left our country without a functioning Congress while the world is exploding. As a result, legislation to refreeze the $6 billion, proposed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), cannot move. (Nor, by the way, can any new military-aid package to help Israel fight the Hamas jihadists who killed 30 Americans in addition to more than 1,300 Israelis — to say nothing of Hamas’s wounding of 3,200 people, taking 199 hostages, and causing 13 other Americans to be missing.)
If we had a functioning Congress, the $6 billion would not be the only aspect of Biden’s deal with Hamas-patron Iran that was worth scrutinizing. As I detailed over the weekend, there is also the ostensible “prisoner swap,” in which Biden actually pardoned three men accused by the Justice Department of clandestine activities on behalf of Iran; they have been released in the United States (i.e., not sent back to Iran).
But understand: If the McConnell/Cotton legislation could be moved through Congress, it would be a source of embarrassment for President Biden, but it would not actually deny funds to Iran. It would be locking the barn door when the horse is long gone. The blunt fact is that the United States government no longer has power to freeze the funds. You can’t freeze what you don’t have. The $6 billion is in Doha, under Qatari control.
Note that Qatar so prizes its alliance with Iran — just last year, it signed 14 bilateral agreements with Iran to forge even closer ties – that it was willing was to endure nearly four years of severed diplomatic relations with its closest Arab Muslim allies in order to maintain its partnerships with Tehran’s jihadist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, et al.). Yet regarding the $6 billion transferred to benefit the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism, America’s only recourse, thanks to Biden’s blundering, is the good graces of the sharia supremacist regime in Doha — the very Qatari regime to which Iran wanted Biden to transfer the money. Good luck with that.