The Trump administration is expected to permit Iran to remain connected to the international banking system, a major concession to European allies who have been pressuring senior U.S. officials to keep this key lifeline to the Islamic Republic open, according to U.S. officials familiar with the situation.
The United States is set to allow Iran to remain connected to the SWIFT baking system, an international monetary consortium that facilities cross-border transactions, according to sources familiar with ongoing talks between top U.S. officials and European allies who have been pressuring the Trump administration to take a softer line on Tehran ahead of the Nov. 4 implementation of new sanctions on Iran.
The move is being met with frustration by Iran hawks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who have argued that SWIFT continues to provide Iran with a critical financial lifeline as the country continues to fund terrorist operations across the region despite its ailing economy.
In the past months, as European allies pressured the Trump administration to take a softer line with Iran, SWIFT has emerged as a key sticking point. While the Trump administration had vowed to choke off Iran’s financial routes, senior officials appear to have softened that stance in the face of European pressure.
U.S. officials familiar with the state of play on these negotiations told the Washington Free Beacon that Iran will remain connected to the SWIFT system, despite opposition by Iran hawks in the administration and in Congress.
The internal battle over Iran’s access to SWIFT has been brewing for months and is likely to remain at the forefront ahead of the implementation of new sanctions next month due to opposition by the Israelis and others who aim to see Iran completely iced out of the international banking system.
“The Europeans are clowning the Americans,” said one source familiar with the recent discussions between American and foreign officials. “They sold [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin on this idea that keeping Iran on SWIFT will generate intelligence—the word they keep using is ‘leads’—and Mnuchin is now echoing Obama talking points about how sanctioning some banks is enough.”
“He’s making Trump into Obama,” said the source, who would only discuss the sensitive issue on background. “Meanwhile the Europeans and Iranians are publicly gloating because they know that as long as Iran stays on SWIFT they can wait out Trump.”
The Trump administration has been under pressure for months from European allies to keep Iran connected to SWIFT, despite fierce opposition to the move among some inside the administration and many legislative allies on Capitol Hill.
The latest concession on SWIFT by the Trump administration has sparked criticism among some who say the current administration is becoming similar to its predecessor, the Obama administration, which worked to defang sanctions and open up Iran’s economy to the globe in spite of its global terrorism operations in regional hotspots such as Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said in recent remarks the administration is working to prevent sanctioned transactions from taking place via SWIFT.
“I can assure you our objective is to make sure that sanctioned transactions do not occur whether it’s through SWIFT or any other mechanism,” he told Reuters. “Our focus is to make sure that the sanctions are enforced.”
While Mnuchin would not offer details on the nature of U.S. talks with SWIFT leaders, he vowed the administration would “quickly” identify banks that can continue conducting transactions under the rubric of humanitarian aid to Iran.
“We want to get to the right outcome, which is cutting off transactions,” Mnuchin said.
A Treasury Department spokesman told the Free Beacon the administration will closely police the body’s activities to ensure that no sanctioned Iranian entities can use it.
“Secretary Mnuchin has led an intense economic pressure campaign against Iran as part of this administration’s comprehensive strategy to address the totality of Iran’s malign and destabilizing activity, with much more to come,” said the official.
“Treasury has made it very clear that we will continue to cut off bad Iranian actors, including designated banks, from accessing the international financial system in a number of different ways,” the official explained. “We will also take action against those attempting to conduct prohibited transactions with sanctioned Iranian entities regardless of the mechanisms used.”
However, the administration “will not comment specifically on any future sanctions on SWIFT or other entities,” the official said.
The latest statement from Mnuchin and other Treasury Department officials has not assuaged fears.
Mark Dubowitz, a sanctions expert and chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has pushed hard for crippling sanctions on Iran, told the Free Beacon that Iran must be fully iced out from SWIFT, as was done with North Korea recently as a result of its rogue nuclear program.
“Recently SWIFT’s board of directors wisely expelled designated North Korean banks without EU direction; they would be wise to do the same thing against banks used by the Islamic Republic of Iran to finance its dangerous and destructive activities,” Dubowitz said. “The SWIFT board backed by the U.S. Treasury Department should preserve the integrity of the global financial system; allowing bad banks to stay on SWIFT to threaten the integrity of that system is bad practice and bad policy.”
Other sources familiar with the state of play expressed frustration and accused the Trump administration of taking a weak approach, despite its tough rhetoric on Iran and its terrorist funding streams.
“John Kerry is holding a candlelight vigil tonight praying Donald Trump doesn’t kick Iran off SWIFT,” said one veteran foreign policy hand involved in the issue. “That’s the only way his plan to keep the Iran deal alive succeeds. Trump will have proven weaker than Obama on sanctions and he will have caved on his maximum pressure strategy before it even started.”
2 thoughts on “In major reversal, Trump Will Allow Iran Key Financial Lifeline”
Noor should mail some pipe bombs [ that don’t detonate, can’t detonate, so nobody get hurts, mail some faux pipe bombs ] to TUT headquarters, then Mark Glenn and his TUTzie groupies can blame us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS who can see clearly that Sandy Hook was NOT a real shooting, but a Hoax and a Psyops. That would go a long way to undermining us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS, maybe it will even totally defeat us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS forever. Everyone will think us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS are wacko violent and NOT to be trusted. I think it’s a good idea, don’t you, *grin*. ed note–I am asked from time to time how it is that the comments section on this website is relatively sterile in terms of the kind of wacky comments that are (unfortunately) common fare on other websites dealing with similar subject matter, and to which my/our answer invariably is that we value this struggle for our liberation enough that we don’t allow the nutcases even 3 milliseconds opportunity in squandering as much as a micro-gram of our already-limited resources in spewing their nonsense.
However, once or twice a year, we do allow one of the crazies to slip through the cracks in the interests of underscoring another theme that appears here regularly, which is the preponderance of mentally incapacitated individuals who traffic within the confines of this ‘muuvmnt’ and the damage that they do to our credibility vis a vis having a positive effect upon the general public.
Joe Scusati has been trying unsuccessfully to post here for many years, to obvious no avail. Most of his posts left for moderation are so cobbled and convoluted that every single word is underlined due to spellcheck/syntax/grammatical errors, to say nothing of the utter word salad that the thesis alone encompasses.
The comment above is emblematic of this very phenomenon, beginning with the ‘nom de plume’ which he chooses to use, ‘FoghornLeghornTouringClintonFoundationHeadquarters’. From there it is nothing short of a verbal acid trip that has no continuity of logic or reasoning, although it seems obvious that Joe the (un) Excused obviously still to this day maintains his mental erection over the ‘non-shooting’ event that never took place at Sandy Hook Elementary school 6 years ago.
Now, again, as it always is here, the question is, ‘how does this play out in the bigger game in which we are all involved?’
Joe Scusati, the (un) ‘excused’ (‘Scusati’ being the past participle of the Italian infinitive ‘scusare’ which means ‘to excuse’, a variation of which is often heard in Italian discourse such as ‘Scusame’ or ‘Mi Scusa’, meaning ‘excuse me’) is but one of thousands out there in that mass of asses collectively calling themselves the ‘trooth muuvmnt’ selling every variation of snake oil imaginable from flat-earthism to the ‘no one died at Sandy Hook’ nonsense. They scurry around like little rodents, moving from place to place in the comments section of various websites from Alex Jones to TUT, leaving their little teeth marks and rodent pellets while offering nothing of any substance whatsoever that contributes in even a minor capacity to the collective liberation which most (or at least many) of us seek.
actually, mark, i vote to cut joe (scusati, is it? 🙂 ) some extra slack due to various extenuating circumstances.
because i recognize that inimitable style of TROJ from the other site, where i always defended him – and paid the price exacted by some world-class irredeemable hypocrites who treat the smallest deviation from the rigidly imposed dogma with brutality that would do deutoronomy proud.
joe/TROJ got his pluses and minuses rather finely balanced but while the minuses are of the common sort, to wit, being a shit-disturber simply because he seems to masochistically enjoy getting into people’s heads and burrowing under their skin in order to cause a heated response, irritation equals pleasure, no? or obsessing with matters that are of zero interest to everyone else,
on the plus side, he is a true poet of americana with an unerring instinct and ear for the common street lingo, a socio-political hip-hop as it were, possesses a fine sense of humor when so moved and on unfortunately too rarely exercised occasion, quite a probing analysis of the circumstances.
and no, the judgment is by no means mutual, he has in the past extended himself to the limit to insult me in every which way but hey, i know it is joe/TROJ and he ain’t no bad dude, just a self-made pest saddled with what seems like a neurological problem for which he cannot be blamed and some uncommon salutary qualities.
if TUT didn’t exist and i wasn’t so lazy, i would set up my own site and give signore scusati a free run, let people make of him what they want of his antics.
i would only impose some limit on the size and frequency of posts that would apply to everyone across the board.
just my two sents (actually not mine but property of the federal reserve bank that i humbly borrowed for the occasion of pitching on joe’s behalf).
Noor should mail some pipe bombs [ that don’t detonate, can’t detonate, so nobody get hurts, mail some faux pipe bombs ] to TUT headquarters, then Mark Glenn and his TUTzie groupies can blame us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS who can see clearly that Sandy Hook was NOT a real shooting, but a Hoax and a Psyops. That would go a long way to undermining us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS, maybe it will even totally defeat us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS forever. Everyone will think us Sandy Hook TRUTHERS are wacko violent and NOT to be trusted. I think it’s a good idea, don’t you, *grin*.
ed note–I am asked from time to time how it is that the comments section on this website is relatively sterile in terms of the kind of wacky comments that are (unfortunately) common fare on other websites dealing with similar subject matter, and to which my/our answer invariably is that we value this struggle for our liberation enough that we don’t allow the nutcases even 3 milliseconds opportunity in squandering as much as a micro-gram of our already-limited resources in spewing their nonsense.
However, once or twice a year, we do allow one of the crazies to slip through the cracks in the interests of underscoring another theme that appears here regularly, which is the preponderance of mentally incapacitated individuals who traffic within the confines of this ‘muuvmnt’ and the damage that they do to our credibility vis a vis having a positive effect upon the general public.
Joe Scusati has been trying unsuccessfully to post here for many years, to obvious no avail. Most of his posts left for moderation are so cobbled and convoluted that every single word is underlined due to spellcheck/syntax/grammatical errors, to say nothing of the utter word salad that the thesis alone encompasses.
The comment above is emblematic of this very phenomenon, beginning with the ‘nom de plume’ which he chooses to use, ‘FoghornLeghornTouringClintonFoundationHeadquarters’. From there it is nothing short of a verbal acid trip that has no continuity of logic or reasoning, although it seems obvious that Joe the (un) Excused obviously still to this day maintains his mental erection over the ‘non-shooting’ event that never took place at Sandy Hook Elementary school 6 years ago.
Now, again, as it always is here, the question is, ‘how does this play out in the bigger game in which we are all involved?’
Joe Scusati, the (un) ‘excused’ (‘Scusati’ being the past participle of the Italian infinitive ‘scusare’ which means ‘to excuse’, a variation of which is often heard in Italian discourse such as ‘Scusame’ or ‘Mi Scusa’, meaning ‘excuse me’) is but one of thousands out there in that mass of asses collectively calling themselves the ‘trooth muuvmnt’ selling every variation of snake oil imaginable from flat-earthism to the ‘no one died at Sandy Hook’ nonsense. They scurry around like little rodents, moving from place to place in the comments section of various websites from Alex Jones to TUT, leaving their little teeth marks and rodent pellets while offering nothing of any substance whatsoever that contributes in even a minor capacity to the collective liberation which most (or at least many) of us seek.
actually, mark, i vote to cut joe (scusati, is it? 🙂 ) some extra slack due to various extenuating circumstances.
because i recognize that inimitable style of TROJ from the other site, where i always defended him – and paid the price exacted by some world-class irredeemable hypocrites who treat the smallest deviation from the rigidly imposed dogma with brutality that would do deutoronomy proud.
joe/TROJ got his pluses and minuses rather finely balanced but while the minuses are of the common sort, to wit, being a shit-disturber simply because he seems to masochistically enjoy getting into people’s heads and burrowing under their skin in order to cause a heated response, irritation equals pleasure, no? or obsessing with matters that are of zero interest to everyone else,
on the plus side, he is a true poet of americana with an unerring instinct and ear for the common street lingo, a socio-political hip-hop as it were, possesses a fine sense of humor when so moved and on unfortunately too rarely exercised occasion, quite a probing analysis of the circumstances.
and no, the judgment is by no means mutual, he has in the past extended himself to the limit to insult me in every which way but hey, i know it is joe/TROJ and he ain’t no bad dude, just a self-made pest saddled with what seems like a neurological problem for which he cannot be blamed and some uncommon salutary qualities.
if TUT didn’t exist and i wasn’t so lazy, i would set up my own site and give signore scusati a free run, let people make of him what they want of his antics.
i would only impose some limit on the size and frequency of posts that would apply to everyone across the board.
just my two sents (actually not mine but property of the federal reserve bank that i humbly borrowed for the occasion of pitching on joe’s behalf).