The Biden-Harris administration gave the Iranian regime access to $200 billion in oil revenues through lax sanctions enforcement, according to a report Monday in the Washington Free Beacon, citing new government data.
The Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo wrote:
The full financial toll of this sanctions relief only became clear in recent days following the publication of a hotly anticipated U.S. government report on Iran’s oil trade. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, a government agency that monitors global markets, was mandated under an April 2024 law to publicly tally Iran’s oil revenue, providing one of the first official snapshots after four years of sparse sanctions enforcement by the Biden-Harris administration.
The report, released late last week, found that Iran made $144 billion in revenue during the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration. This includes $37 billion in 2021, significantly up from the $16 billion Tehran made in 2020, the last year of the Trump administration. Oil revenue rose to $54 billion in 2022 and hit $53 billion in 2023, showing that Tehran’s trade in crude remained at historically high levels.
Iran is on pace for another big year in 2024, exporting more than $34 billion in oil through October, according to figures compiled by United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that monitors Tehran’s global oil shipments through a comprehensive tanker tracker.
Former President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Iran were so powerful that they made the regime unwilling to confront the U.S., according to the New York Times in 2020.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris reversed course upon taking office, seeking a renewed nuclear deal with Iran and deferring enforcement of oil sanctions.
The additional revenues available to the regime, critics say, funded terror attacks, via proxies.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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