Helping the Mullahs

There is nothing more aggrevating than the double standard that has been applied by the main stream media to the previous administration and the current one. Imagine for a moment if Donald Trump had gone to two major U.S. banks and pressed them to allow North Korea to avoid monetary sanctions and covert currency in a manner that would provide them with benefit. Given that Trump's pressure essentially asked the banks to violate U.S. law, it would be a major scandal, and screeches of "impeachment" would fill the air. Even better, the banks refused to cooperation, demonstrating the moral vacuity of the request.

The only problem is Donald Trump did none of that for the NoKos, but Barack Obama did all of it for the Mad Mullahs of Iran as he negotiated his infamous Iran deal. Sohrab Ahmari explains:

Wednesday’s bombshell Associated Press scoop detailing the Obama administration’s secret effort to help Tehran gain access to the American financial system was a case study. In the months after Iran and the great powers led by the U.S. agreed on the nuclear deal, the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord.

That’s according to the AP’s Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee, citing a newly released report from the GOP-led Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Lederman and Lee write: “The effort was unsuccessful because American banks—themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions—declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion . . . but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.”

Put another way: The Obama administration pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system, and the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury.

This was far from the first instance in which the Obama administration bent over backward, going far beyond the requirements of the deal, to help the Iranian regime cash in on the deal. In May 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry encouraged a gathering of European banking leaders in London to invest in Iran. This, even though the world’s leading anti-money laundering standards body had deemed Iran “a serious threat to the integrity of the global financial system” a few months earlier.

The comedy in all of this is that the Democrats are the first to accuse Trump of "obstruction of justice" and "collusion," when the last Democrat president did all of that and more vis a vis Iran. Of course, the past president could do no wrong, so what's the big deal? After all, he was on the path of the angels, even if a few laws were broken on the way.