The Biden administration has allowed billions in sanctions waivers that benefit Iran, with estimated billions more in unsanctioned oil sales, which allows the Iranian government to continue diverting money to its drone factories and funding proxy groups, an expert told Fox News Digital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018What happens when you end up releasing that money is that it goes into the general funds, which can then be used in lots of different ways,\u2019 Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018If they are using the sanctions relief to fund their general budget, then ultimately [they] are to the benefit of the IRGC because the IRGC partakes in that regular budget,\u2019 Schanzer said, noting the Biden administration has often argued that any waivers do not ultimately and directly benefit the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Let me put it this way: There is no way to do it without ultimately benefiting the regime and its ultimate objective, which is to fund its malign activities abroad,\u2019 Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury noted.<\/p>\n
A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration \u2018has not lifted a single sanction on Iran. Rather, we continue to increase pressure.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Our extensive\u00a0sanctions\u00a0on\u00a0Iran\u00a0remain in place, and we continue to enforce them,\u2019 the spokesperson said. \u2018Over the last three years, the U.S. has sanctioned over 600 individuals and entities connected to the full range of Iran\u2019s problematic and dangerous behaviors, UAV and missile proliferation, terrorism, terrorist financing and other forms of illicit trade, horrific human rights abuses and support for proxy terrorist groups.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We have even seen the regime fail to meet its own revenue expectations as it struggles to evade our sanctions and find illicit buyers for its oil,\u2019 the spokesperson said, not commenting on the fact Iran does find buyers for its oil. The spokesperson insisted that the U.S. sanctions, in combination with \u2018Iran\u2019s economy and regime mismanagement,\u2019 have brought the country\u2019s currency \u2018to the lowest it has ever been against the U.S. dollar.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
A second State Department spokesperson reiterated the fact that the sanctions waiver allowing Iraq to buy electricity from Iran has been renewed 21 times since the Trump administration first issued the waiver in 2018 and that \u2018any notion\u2019 that money goes to Iran due to the waivers \u2018is false and misleading.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018We have been in ongoing engagement with allies and partners, including at the G-7 and with the EU, on ways to increase pressure on Iran,\u2019 the second spokesperson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Fox News Digital analysis, in combination with the FDD\u2019s research, determined that Iran has received between $16 billion and $20 billion in sanctions waivers, with billions more gained through the sale of Iranian oil, which the U.S. has sanctioned but has not managed to totally prevent due to a mixture of lax government oversight and more sophisticated evasion methods.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That includes a $10 billion sanctions waiver so Iraq can trade to obtain electricity from Iran, a $6 billion sanctions waiver agreed for South Korea to transfer money in exchange for the release of five Americans and $3.8 billion gained through the sale of petrochemicals in order to dodge a Trump-era sanction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The U.S. State Department in March came under fire for resuming a sanctions waiver, which had been renewed since the Trump administration first issued the waiver in 2018. Some experts estimated the waiver as having a valuation of around $10 billion for Iran.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That waiver particularly allowed for the transfer of funds between Iran and Iraq so that Iraq, which remains a U.S. ally, could continue to use electricity imported from Iran \u2013 but critics saw it merely as another easement on sanctions against Iran.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018None of this money goes to the mullahs. None of this money goes into Tehran. The sanctions relief that is provided actually goes to vendors that provide humanitarian assistance to the Iranian people,\u2019 White House national security advisor John Kirby told reporters at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Not only do the Iraqi people not suffer because of this, the Iranian people aren\u2019t going to suffer because of this,\u2019 Kirby added. \u2018That allows for Iraq to be able to work its way off of Iranian energy so that they can keep the lights on.\u2019<\/p>\n
Schanzer countered the administration\u2019s argument by noting that \u2018as soon as [money] hits the system, it is going to be diverted or used in a cynical way,\u2019 even taking what humanitarian aid gets into the country through third-party vendors and reselling it to the civilian population, effectively laundering the assistance into money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018When we talk about dual-use goods or even things that they need in order to feed their fighters things along those lines, it is a consistently cynical diversion scheme,\u2019 Schanzer said. \u2018Whether we\u2019re talking about Iran itself or we\u2019re talking about Iran\u2019s proxies.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018When the administration was saying that we shouldn\u2019t be putting sanctions on the Houthis because it would ultimately block humanitarian assistance from getting into Yemen \u2013 guess what?\u2019 Schanzer continued. \u2018When that humanitarian assistance gets to Yemen, who benefits? The people that control the territory in question, which right now a large chunk of Yemen is controlled by the Houthis.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
The New York Times in February published the results of an investigation that determined Iran had managed to sell \u2018oil worth billions of dollars\u2019 thanks to \u2018a significant gap in U.S. oversight.\u2019 Shipping vessels owned by shell companies and using \u2018spoofing\u2019 methods to hide their location made dozens of trips throughout 2023 to ferry Iran\u2019s oil under the sanctions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The lack of a total crackdown on Iran\u2019s oil shipments has led a significant number of experts to argue that the Biden administration may have started willfully turning a blind eye to Iran\u2019s activities \u2013 partially since the surge in oil sales is clear and evident.<\/p>\n
Javier Blas, a long-time energy and commodities reporter, wrote in a Bloomberg op-ed that \u2018the conspiracy theorist inside me says the White House has turned a blind eye to the Iranian sales because it\u2019s more worried about inflation \u2026 not only has Iran boosted oil production, but its exports have surged even more because it\u2019s been able to sell a large chunk of the crude it was forced to put in the past into storage, both onshore and into tankers turned into floating storage facilities.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s growing cooperation with China also plays a significant role in how the country has managed to dodge sanctions, according to Foreign Policy, which cited a 25-year economic cooperation agreement the two countries agreed to in March 2021, as well as Iran\u2019s decision to join the Beijing-led BRICS economic bloc, which gives Iran access to other currencies and trading options.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018There\u2019s no question that Russia, China and others are working to provide assistance to the Iranians,\u2019 Schanzer claimed. \u2018We know this to be the case, but, with the Russians and Chinese, it\u2019s often done in trade or in arms purchases, oil \u2026 if they get remuneration in rubles or in RMB (Chinese Yuan) in trade surplus where they can cash in for other products that\u2019s not the same as dollars, and it\u2019s not the same as some of the goods that will come through American channels.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fox News Digital\u2019s Caitlin McFall contributed to this report.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
The Biden administration has allowed billions in sanctions waivers that benefit Iran, with estimated billions more in unsanctioned oil sales, which allows the Iranian government to continue diverting money to its drone factories and funding proxy groups, an expert told Fox News Digital.\u00a0 \u2018What happens when you end up releasing that money is that it <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":18592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}