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| $6B Prisoner Swap Was ‘Just a Drop in the Bucket' for Iran. Here's How Much Tehran Has Raked in Under Biden. | |
| 2023-10-19 | |
| [DailySignal] Republicans have castigated President Joe Biden’s administration for freeing up $6 billion in funds for Iran’s Islamist regime, money that likely contributed to Tehran’s funding of Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group that slaughtered more than 1,400 Israelis and took about 200 hostage Oct. 7. Yet the Biden administration’s policies freed up far more than $6 billion for Iran. “It’s a drop in the bucket,” Robert Greenway, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.) Greenway led a team to plan and execute the most significant U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. He served as a principal architect of the Abraham Accords, working as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and senior director of the National Security Council’s Middle East and North African Affairs Directorate. Referring to Iran, Greenway described the released $6 billion as “a fraction of the overall revenue that the Biden administration consciously has allowed them to have.” He said Biden’s policies, by relaxing Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and signaling his willingness to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran, has emboldened Tehran and signaled other countries in the region that they should work with Iran. “We’re encouraging everyone else to do this. Everybody in the region is paying Iran not to attack them,” Greenway warned. He urged that the U.S. stop paying Hamas through funds ostensibly for Palestinian aid. “This is extortion. I pay so Gaza won’t attack again,” Greenway said. “We should stop writing checks.” While Greenway acknowledged Biden’s strong rhetoric in support of Israel, he said Americans and Israelis should see through that facade. “I literally paid the people who attacked you,” Greenway said, speaking as though he were Biden. “No one should be defending this. No one in Israel can think that Biden is their friend.” According to The Daily Signal’s calculations, Iran has received approximately $70 billion more under Biden than it would have under Trump. Biden repeatedly has said that there is no “specific evidence” showing that Tehran had any involvement in the Hamas terrorist attack, but Iran has funded Hamas for years. Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told the BBC that Iran gave the green light for the attack. The Wall Street Journal reported that “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah” confirmed that “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions.” Furthermore, Greenway and another Heritage Foundation national security expert, Victoria Coates, wrote: “Absent significant training, equipment, and intelligence capabilities supplied by Iran, Hamas would never have been able to have carried out such an operation.” The $6 billion figure traces back to 2018, when the Trump administration granted a waiver to South Korea, among other nations, to continue buying Iranian oil after the U.S. left the 2015 nuclear deal. The Trump administration canceled these exemptions in 2019, diverting payments for already-delivered oil into escrow accounts. Biden agreed to release the $6 billion South Korea owes Iran as part of a prisoner exchange in August. The Biden administration has insisted that the $6 billion would fund only humanitarian projects, but money is fungible. Even if that money would support only infrastructure, health care, or education, it would free up funds for Tehran to send money to Hamas. Even if none of that money had been spent before Oct. 7, as the Biden administration has insisted, Tehran may have spent money elsewhere, expecting those funds to materialize. Perhaps in response to criticism regarding the unfrozen funds, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats that the U.S. and Qatar agreed to prevent Iran from accessing the $6 billion. It remains unclear whether any of that money had made it back to Tehran, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said none had. Even if Tehran doesn’t receive a penny from South Korea, the Biden administration has allowed more funds to flow to Iran from other sources.
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| Posted by:NoMoreBS |