Senate Probe Exposes Obama's Secret Iran Deal To Sidestep US Sanctions

Seemingly not satisfied with airlifting billions in US taxpayer cash on pallets to Tehran, AP reports that the Obama administration secretly sought to give Iran access to the U.S. financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so.

An investigation by Senate Republicans released Wednesday that exposes the Obama administration's politically-motivated actions to secretly offer help to Iran while withholding the truth from the American taxpayers about the extent of Washington's handouts to Tehran. As AP reports,

The report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed that under President Barack Obama,the Treasury Department issued a license in February 2016, never previously disclosed, that would have allowed Iran to convert $5.7 billion it held at a bank in Oman from Omani rials into euros by exchanging them first into U.S. dollars. If the Omani bank had allowed the exchange without such a license, it would have violated sanctions that bar Iran from transactions that touch the U.S. financial system.

While issuing the license was not illegal, AP reports that it still went above and beyond what the Obama administration was required to do under the terms of the nuclear agreement.

Under that deal, the U.S. and world powers gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program. Last month, President Donald Trump declared the U.S. was pulling out of what he described as a “disastrous deal.”

The license issued to Bank Muscat stood in stark contrast to repeated public statements from the Obama White House, the Treasury and the State Department, all of which denied that the administration was contemplating allowing Iran access to the U.S. financial system.

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