Republicans: Biden admin blocking Congressional probes into Iran sanctions

Republicans are accusing the Biden administration of blocking over a dozen Congressional probes into America’s diplomatic efforts with Iran and the White House’s failure to enforce sanctions on the Islamic Republic, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The results of a year long study commissioned by Republican House leaders, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) reacted on Thursday by noting that it had also sent over a dozen letters to the White House asking for clarification on why sanctions have not been enforced for the last year without getting a clear answer.

The lawmakers charged that the Biden White House is stalling their investigations in order to prevent GOP members from receiving current information about negotiations with Iran and the status of sanctions.

“Iran is richer, stronger, and closer to a nuclear weapon” than it has ever been, one year into Biden’s presidency, the RSC policy report stated. It gave Biden a failing grade for not forcing Iran to curb its nuclear program. The report also accused the White House of breaking its promise on multiple occasions to enforce US sanctions against Iran, at the same time as it has been making diplomatic overtures to Tehran.

“It is clear that the Biden administration, while not technically lifting many of President Trump’s sanctions on Iran, is tacitly providing sanctions relief through lack of enforcement, to coax the Iranians to re-enter the failed Iran nuclear deal,” the report said. “Unfortunately, such a tactic only hardened Iran’s will to stall in negotiations and step-up provocation” and resulted in Iranian sponsored terrorist attack during 2021 on US infrastructure in the Middle East as well as attacks against American allies.

Republican leaders spoke to former senior national security officials while writing the report who painted a picture of the White House purposely easing sanctions enforcement on Iran so that Tehran could recover financially after four years of tough sanctions enforcement under the Trump administration had left the government with dwindling cash reserves.

“Despite repeatedly stating that no sanctions relief would be provided to Iran until Iran returned to the failed Iran nuclear agreement, the Biden administration has reneged on that promise by not vigorously enforcing existing penalties, and, in some cases, abusing waiver and license authorities directly benefiting the Iranian regime and its affiliates,” said the report.