Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports on more damaging news for the outgoing Biden administration.
Earlier this year, officials from across the Biden-Harris administration reviewed intelligence detailing Iraq’s central role in a billion-dollar Iranian oil smuggling scheme. But they largely ignored that intelligence, according to those briefed on the matter, giving Tehran what one former U.S. official described as a “free pass” to evade American sanctions and rake in illicit cash.
Officials from the State Department, Treasury Department, and intelligence community received the 45-page intelligence report in April and sat for multiple briefs on its material. Assembled by a number of international intelligence agencies and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the report identified Iraq, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, as central to an Iranian “oil and fuel smuggling” operation that significantly expanded in 2022.
Iran generates roughly $1 billion from the smuggling scheme annually, Reuters reported, money that is “directly funding the Iranian threat network,” according to the intelligence report. The briefing on that report came just months after Iran-backed terror group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, sparking a war that later spread to Lebanon, where fellow Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah launches near-daily missile barrages at the Jewish state.
But the Biden-Harris administration apparently did little to act on the intelligence. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers and enforces trade sanctions, responded to the report by drawing up sanctions packages targeting Iraq—but never actually put them in place, according to a former U.S. official briefed on the matter.
The administration’s intimate knowledge of the smuggling operation has not been reported. It reflects a lax approach to Iran that has allowed the Islamic regime to rake in around $200 billion in illicit funds after Trump-era sanctions nearly bankrupted Tehran. And while Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah has crippled Iran’s terror proxies, Tehran’s financial resurgence could spark an early diplomatic confrontation when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House later this month.
