Biden’s Iran ‘Freeze’ Con Job

A t the risk of trying our readers’ patience (see here, here, here, and here), I am again banging away at the $6 billion that President Biden caused to be transferred for the benefit of Iran as both ransom for hostages and an enticement to reenter the disastrous nuclear deal the Obama-Biden administration struck with Iran in 2015 (and from which President Trump extricated the United States in 2018).

Here’s the bottom line: Contrary to what Biden officials say, they know they can’t “refreeze” the funds. After all, if they could, they would: Iran, a designated state sponsor of terrorism under federal law for nearly 40 years, backs Hamas and, patently, was complicit in the October 7 atrocities, in which — quite apart from massively murdering and savaging Israelis — Hamas killed at least 22 Americans, with at least 17 other Americans missing (and likely either killed or taken hostage, along with scores of abducted Israelis). Even before Saturday, there were sanctions in place that the Biden administration purports to be enforcing. Clearly then, given the political heat the president is feeling for putting $6 billion at Tehran’s disposal shortly before its proxies slaughtered our citizens and our allies, if he could freeze the funds, he would.

He can’t because he lost his leverage when he waived the sanctions and transferred the funds to Iran’s ally, Qatar. He’d need Qatar’s agreement to freeze the funds. It’s so certain that Qatar would not consent that Biden won’t even ask, because, in this moment, being rebuffed would be too humiliating. So the administration has come up with a fairy tale: Well, we could freeze if we decided to, but there’s no need to because Iran hasn’t touched the money and we can’t “confirm” that Iran was involved in October 7, anyway. (They have to say “confirm” because the evidence is too overwhelming for even Joe Biden to pretend there isn’t any.)

Biden isn’t confirming Iran’s role because if he did, he’d be expected to do something about it; and he’s not asking Qatar to freeze funds because if he did, he’d be expected to do something about it when they turned him down flat.

Let’s back up.

The $6 billion at issue was generated by Iranian oil sales to South Korea. The United States was able to freeze the funds because South Korea honors our anti-Iran sanctions when we enforce them, as the Trump administration aggressively did. The funds were frozen by the South Korean government until Biden issued a formal waiver on September 11, 2023, allowing them to be transferred to Qatar, which is holding them for the benefit of Iran.

The strings attached to this transfer are publicly disputed.

The Biden administration claims that it has the authority to refreeze the funds. This position was initially staked out by State Department spokesman Matt Miller at the time of the transfer and has been reiterated in the past two days by national-security adviser Jake Sullivan and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. According to Biden officials, the funds are never to be directly in the Iranian regime’s possession. Rather, as needed, Iran is to alert Qatar that portions of the funds should be disbursed directly to third-party, non-government providers of humanitarian goods and services. The administration further claims that U.S. monitors will sedulously eye the funds, transaction-by-transaction. If Iran were to try diverting any of the $6 billion to unapproved purposes, Biden officials insist that the money could be instantly refrozen. Tellingly, they have declined to discuss what the mechanism for that would be.

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, has posited the jihadist regime’s competing position. When Biden issued the September 11 waiver, Raisi told NBC News that Iran had “authority” over how the funds would be spent. “This money belongs to the Iranian people, the Iranian government,” he added, “so the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide what to do with this money.” Asked about the Biden claim that Tehran’s resort to the funds was restricted to humanitarian purposes, Raisi countered, “‘humanitarian’ means whatever the Iranian people needs [sic], so this money will be budgeted for those needs, and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government.”

No one is describing anything like a snap-back mechanism — an automatic refreeze at the Biden administration’s say-so. Instead, everything depends on the cooperation of Qatar.

Led by Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Qatar’s government is a Janus-faced Sunni regime. Much like its oft-time collaborator, Turkey, Qatar poses as a modernizing Western ally and hosts American military bases, even as it promotes jihadism, abominates Israel, and serves as a bridge between Sunni and Shiite fundamentalism. Unlike Turkey, Qatar is not a NATO ally of the United States, but last year Biden did confer on it coveted “Major Non-NATO Ally” status.

You can see why Iran, which wrote the book on hating the West while playing the West, would form a good working alliance with Qatar, its Gulf neighbor. Indeed, that’s why Iran decided that Doha would be the perfect place for the Biden administration to park Tehran’s $6 billion in South Korean oil profits.

The other thing Qatar, Turkey, and Iran have in common, of course, is sponsorship of Hamas — meaning: significant financial and other material support.

Qatar and Turkey are currently the two most important patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch. The Brotherhood’s motto — “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Quran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” — is reaffirmed in the Hamas charter. As I outlined in my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, since Israel’s establishment as a modern state in 1948, the principal aim of the virulently anti-Western Brotherhood has been Israel’s destruction. Qatar has harbored such Brotherhood eminences as the late Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (revered by Hamas for his fatwas endorsing murderous brutality against Israel), and it currently harbors the leaders of Hamas (who were video-recorded Saturday celebrating the atrocities against Israel from their comfy quarters in Doha).

With that as background, bear in mind that Qatar has dominion and control over the $6 billion — Biden surrendered U.S. control when he waived the sanction so the loot could be transferred to Doha. Therefore, if the Biden administration wanted the funds to be frozen again, it would have to persuade Qatar to do the freezing.

The administration hasn’t produced any document attesting that Qatar has committed to be directed by the United States on this matter. Again, if Qatar had agreed to be so bound, Biden would quickly direct the funds to be frozen in order to ease growing public outrage. So the administration is not relying on a formal agreement.When it claims to be able to freeze the funds, it is risibly relying on the already existing sanctions — i.e., the sanctions that Biden specifically waived as to this pot of $6 billion, and of which he has more generally eased enforcement, enabling Tehran to rake in a windfall of about $30 billion (despite knowing that the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism will use a goodly chunk of its surging revenues to underwrite jihad against the United States and Israel).

When Biden officials claim that they can refreeze the funds, what they’d have us imagine is this: If Qatar releases some of the money at Iran’s direction, and then Iran is detected diverting the money in some way that would violate some sanction (presumably, one Biden hasn’t already waived), the administration could then ask Qatar to freeze the rest of the money (i.e., to decline further Iranian disbursement directives).

But would Qatar comply with such a Biden request? Dream on.

Again, the $6 billion that Biden put at Iran’s disposal is a growing scandal after this weekend’s atrocities, which now include Americans murdered and taken hostage. Any sensible president who actually had the power to freeze the funds would have frozen them by now. Enriching Iran was brainless, but denying it riches would be a no-brainer.

Biden is not trying to freeze the money since he knows Qatar wouldn’t agree to do it. Qatar is a sharia-supremacist regime; it is not going to rupture its relationship with an allied sharia-supremacist regime just because the American government is embarrassed. Notice that, immediately after Hamas’s barbarous weekend attacks, Qatar joined Iran in publicly blaming Israel, stating: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs holds Israel alone responsible for the current escalation due to this [sic] ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Moreover, the regime in Doha holds heavy leverage in dealing with Biden. Besides needing it to continue allowing American forces to station in Qatari territory, Biden is relying on Qatar to help meet the energy needs of Europe (which is largely cut off from Russian supplies because of the Ukraine war) — if Biden tried to ramp up American fossil-fuel production for that purpose, his climate-alarmist political base would revolt. More to the point, Biden is hoping that Qatar will use its influence with Iran and Hamas to negotiate the release of American and Israeli hostages abducted by the jihadists from Israel over the weekend.

This is plainly why Biden officials are trying to bluster their way through Republican and media questions about the $6 billion. Regardless of how hard they are pressed, administration flacks will keep repeating their risible talking points: Well, in theory we could refreeze the funds if we wanted to, but why should we when Iran hasn’t touched the money? And, ergo, we can rest assured it is not being used to fund terrorism.

Mind you, this is all nonsense anyway. Because money is fungible, once the Iranian regime knew it was there, on deposit with Qatar for the regime’s benefit, Iran was free to divert to terrorism-promotion other funds it would have had to spend on legitimate governmental purposes. Later, it can direct Qatar to disburse some or all of the $6 billion for those ostensibly humanitarian purposes — at which point the Biden administration, assuming we are morons, will bleat, “See, they’re not giving it to Hamas!” (Trust an old prosecutor on this: If the Biden Justice Department were prosecuting a drug-trafficking and money-laundering case, its prosecutors would be the ones lecturing courts and jurors that obviously, money is fungible.)

In fact, let me give you a better, more concrete example of how this works:

On November 8, 2018, a Middle Eastern government provided $15 million to the Hamas regime in Gaza, ostensibly to pay the salaries of its government workers. Very humanitarian. Flush with access to cash, Hamas waited a few days, then fired 500 rockets at Israeli population centers. The Middle Eastern government doling out the money? Oh yeah, well . . . that was Qatar.

So don’t you worry about Iran’s $6 billion getting diverted to the jihad. The Biden administration and Qatar have this covered.