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WASHINGTON—Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)and 18 members of the Committee introduced a resolution to begin proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen.
In introducing the resolution, Chairman Chaffetz said, “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust. He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled. Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress. This action will demonstrate to the American people that the IRS is under repair, and signal that Executive Branch officials who violate the public trust will be held accountable.”
Specifically, Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust in the following ways:
Failed to comply with a subpoena resulting in destruction of key evidence. Commissioner Koskinen failed to locate and preserve IRS records in accordance with a congressional subpoena and an internal preservation order. The IRS erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s emails – key pieces of evidence that were destroyed on Koskinen’s watch.
Failed to testify truthfully and provided false and misleading information. Commissioner Koskinen testified the IRS turned over all emails relevant to the congressional investigation, including all of Ms. Lerner’s emails. When the agency determined Ms. Lerner’s emails were missing, Commissioner Koskinen testified the emails were unrecoverable. These statements were false.
Failed to notify Congress that key evidence was missing. The IRS knew Lois Lerner’s emails were missing in February 2014. In fact, they were not missing; the IRS destroyed the emails on March 4, 2014. The IRS did not notify Congress the emails were missing until June 2014 – four months later, and well after the White House and the Treasury Department were notified.
Background:
In July, Chairman Chaffetz, along with 51 members of Congress,sent a letter to President Obama calling for the removal of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The White House did not respond. The Committee released a video outlining a timeline of key events in the IRS targeting scandal.
WASHINGTON—Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) issued the following statement after the Department of Justice announced there will be no charges against former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner, and the investigation will be closing:
“This announcement is a reminder that the Obama administration continues to refuse to hold anyone accountable at the IRS. Over two years ago, TIGTA conducted an audit confirming the IRS was targeting conservative organizations because oftheir political beliefs. While DOJ may have closed its investigation, as a coequal branch of government, Congress will continue to seek accountability for the American people. A clear message must be sent that using government agencies to stifle citizens’ freedom of speech will not be tolerated. If the administration won’t send that message, Congress will.”
Background:
Earlier this year, Chairman Chaffetz, along with 51 members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama calling for the removal of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Additionally, the Oversight Committee released a video outlining a timeline of key events in the targeting scandal.
Judicial Watch continues to blow the lid off of the Obama administration’s increasingly feeble attempts to cover up its deliberate targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election. And the latest batch of emails JW has obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit portrays an agency potentially willing to go to any lengths to bring down the president’s political opponents – including misusing the private, confidential information of those who dared contribute to the groups the IRS had targeted.
But, we really shouldn’t be surprised, should we? This is an administration whose chief executive has repeatedly acted as if he is above the law. All he needs to govern, he claims, is “a pen and a phone.” His IRS agency, it turns out, has put both to extensive use in harassing and hamstringing conservative organizations – and, perhaps, even individuals it thought might have had a negative impact the president’s efforts to retain office in 2012.
On September 4, we released a new batch of IRS email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Outrageously, it wasn’t until one year later, on May 10, 2013, that Lerner finally conceded that the requests for donor names were “not appropriate, not usual.” (These remarks by Lerner were staged and were the first IRS admission of its improper targeting of Obama’s perceived enemies.)
Not surprisingly, the new documents JW obtained also reveal that 75% of the groups from which the lists were solicited were apparently conservative, with only 5% being liberal. So, Lerner and her IRS collaborators knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the donor lists they had wrongly solicited would be filled with the names of those who had opposed the Obama policies.
These new smoking gun documents came in response to a court order from our October 2013 FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)) filed against the IRS after the agency unlawfully refused to respond to four FOIA requests dating back to May 2013. The emails are contained in the sixth batch of documents the IRS has been forced to produce in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit. Much more here.
There is no longer doubt that certain personnel at the State Department were in collusion with the Clintons, but this time on the Foundation side and with regard to Bill giving speeches for big money.
Each time there was a speech request for Bill, the procedure was to pass the full speech application request to the State Department to determine if the sponsors were acceptable and approved. A database is maintained at State for diplomatic purposes on global and domestic corporations such that the speech requests would be only somewhat investigated. This also gives rise to the fact that government and especially corporations use the State Department and likewise in reverse to advance mutual relationships, agendas and of course money is always involved. Thanks to Judicial Watch for their tireless work as noted below.
The Clinton email scandal is serious enough. Nonetheless, it is useful to remember what exactly Mrs. Clinton was trying to hide before our litigation forced the disclosure of her separate email system. You can bet that the cover up of the depth of her abuse of office for private gain is one thing about which she does not want you to know the full truth. Judicial Watch is in the lead in uncovering these Clinton cash abuses. This week, we released 789 pages of State Department “ethics” review documents concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, revealing that at least one speech by Bill Clinton appeared to take place without the required State Department ethics approval. The documents also include a copy of Bill Clinton’s draft consultant agreement with Laureate Education, Inc., which was submitted for ethics review by the State Department. But the State Department redacted the information regarding compensation and the specific services Bill Clinton was hired to provide to the controversial “for profit” education company. The documents were released as a result of a federal court order in our history-making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department on May 28, 2013, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)). The documents include heavily redacted emails from 2009 about the review of a speech Bill Clinton was set to give to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). An April 1, 2009, email from then-State Department Senior Ethics Counsel Waldo W. “Chip” Brooks notes that the ethics review approval of the speech “was in the hands of Jim [Thessin] and Cheryl Mills. They were to discuss with Counsel to the former President. I do not know if either ever did.” A follow-up September 1, 2009, email to Brooks from a colleague asks, “[W]as there ever a decision on the Clinton request involving scrap recycling? Below is the last e-mail I have on it – I assume it just died since I don’t’ have an outgoing memo approving the event …” Brooks responds two minutes later:
“I think the decision was a soft call to Clinton’s attorney and the talk did not take place. You might want to send an email to [Clinton Foundation Director of Scheduling and Advance] Terry [Krinvic] and tell her that you have a gap in your records because you were gone and wanted to know if the President ever did talk before ISRI?
In fact, Bill Clinton spoke to the scrap recycling group on April 30, 2009, for a reported fee off $250,000. The documents also include a request from Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation for an ethics review of Mr. Clinton’s proposed consulting arrangement, through WJC LLC, with Laureate Education, Inc. The Obama State Department redacted key terms of the attached May 1, 2010, draft agreement, including Mr. Clinton’s fees and the nature of Mr. Clinton’s services. Laureate Education, Inc. is the world’s largest, for-profit, international higher education chain and reportedly uses many of the same practices that spurred a 2014 regulatory crackdown by the Obama administration on for-profit colleges in the United States. In 2010, according to The Washington Post, the company hired former President Clinton to serve as its honorary chancellor, and since that time the former president has made more than a dozen appearances in countries such as Malaysia, Peru, and Spain on the company’s behalf. Since 2010, the former president reportedly has been paid more than $16 million from the company for his services. The Clinton-Laureate connection is rich. The Daily Caller did some digging into the Clinton tax returns that were highly revealing:
Clinton signed on as the honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities, a subsidiary of Laureate Education, in 2010. Despite the honorary nature of his position, that didn’t stop the company from paying him on average approximately $3 million a year. The investment likely paid off, though, as Clinton has lent Laureate significant legitimacy and has served as an advocate for the company overseas, making appearance in countries like Peru and Malaysia to praise it. In addition to these direct payments, Laureate also donated to the Clinton Foundation and has cooperated with the Clinton Global Initiative.
The latest State Department documents also show some push-back by ethics officials concerning proposed Clinton speeches to Chinese government-linked entities. State Department officials, for example, had several questions about a proposed 2009 speech to a subsidiary of the Shanghai Sports Development Corporation, a Chinese “quasi-government” agency. Rather than answer the questions, the Clinton Foundation representative emailed “we are not going to proceed with this.” State Department ethics official “Chip” Brooks commented on the withdrawal of the Chinese speech in December 2009 to then-Deputy Legal Adviser Jim Thessin, “Cooler heads have prevailed.” The documents show the State Department approved scores of requests by former President Bill Clinton to appear as the featured speaker at events sponsored by some of the world’s leading international investment and banking firms, including J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, Sweden’s ABG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Brazil’s Banco Itau, Vista Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard Group (described as “one of the world’s largest investment management companies”), Canada’s Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Saudi Arabia’s SAGIA conglomerate (which claims to be the “gateway to investments in Saudi Arabia”). While the majority of the documents do not contain the fees that Clinton charged for his speaking services, those that are disclosed reveal that the former president routinely received six-figure honorariums for his advice to the international investment counseling firms and banking institutions, including:
Barclays Capital Singapore – $325,000 • Needham Partners South Africa – $350,000 • Cumbre de Negocios (sponsored by Nacional Financiera and El Banco Fuerte de Mexico) – $275,000 and $125,000) • NTRPLC (which describes itself as “developing a new investment portfolio of wind projects in Ireland and the UK”) – $125,000
The documents reveal that between 2009 and 2011, former President Clinton spoke to more than two dozen leading international investment firms and banking institutions, many of them on more than one occasion. At least one of the documents shows that Hillary Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills used a non-governmental email account for the Clinton ethics reviews. Mills reportedly negotiated the “ethics agreement” on behalf of the Clintons and the Foundation that required the Clintons to submit to rigorous conflict-of-interest checks. Despite this, and in apparent violation of Obama administration ethics rules, the documents reveal that Bill Clinton’s requests for speaking engagement approval were invariably copied to Mills, who was involved in ethics reviews as chief of staff for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. The documents also include the demands that Bill Clinton’s speakers bureau, The Harry Walker Agency, laid out for a speech sponsor in Slovenia. Notably, the documents require that press be kept in a “designated, roped off area in the back of the room with a staff escort” and that the “press should not be given access to any area where the President likely may be.” This JW lawsuit broke open the Clinton cash scandal by forcing the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings that led to at least $48 million for the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. Previously disclosed documents in this lawsuit, for example, raise questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, among others. This and other JW lawsuits on Benghazi were the key pressure that forced the disclosure of the Clinton email system. Judicial Watch’s litigation to obtain these conflict of interest records is ongoing. The State Department has yet to search the email records Mrs. Clinton purportedly turned over to the agency last year, despite Judicial Watch’s first requesting these records in 2011 and filing this lawsuit in 2013. The State Department also has yet to explain why it failed to conduct a proper, timely search in the 20 months between when it received our request on May 2, 2011, and February 1, 2013, when Secretary Clinton left office. Judicial Watch also is pressing the State Department to conduct a reasonable search for records, including any emails on the Hillary Clinton email server. On September 3, Judicial Watch filed a request with the court for discovery from the State Department and/or Mrs. Clinton in order to find these records so they might finally be searched as the law requires. Specifically, Judicial Watch’s attorneys ask the court to take steps to obtain the records directly:
To the extent Secretary Clinton or her agents or vendors continue to have access to this agency system of records, or any records from the system that have migrated or been transferred to any new servers, storage devices, or back-up systems, Judicial Watch respectfully submits that a constructive trust must be imposed on any such records and systems so that the State Department can access and search them for records…
Accordingly, Judicial Watch asks the court to order the State Department:
To identify, either through declarations or discovery, all information in its possession or control about the transfer of any data from the “clintonemail.com” server to Secretary Clinton’s vendor and whether any such data is still available or otherwise recoverable from the vendor’s server, storage devices, or back-up systems. If the State Department asserts that it does not have this information or cannot obtain it, limited third-party discovery of Secretary Clinton and/or her vendor should be authorized to enable the Court to obtain the information, which is necessary to remedy the State Department’s failure to search the server during Secretary Clinton’s tenure in office, its further failure to secure all federal records on the server when Secretary Clinton left office, and Secretary Clinton’s wrongful retention of these records after she left office.
Judicial Watch’s court filing details how it was “wrongful and in violation of federal law and State Department regulations” to allow Hillary Clinton “to retain exclusive access to this agency system of records (Clinton’s separate email server) and the official State Department communications and records it contains after she left office on February 1, 2013.” In short, we’re asking the court to allow us to figure out where the Clinton documents are and to take steps to make sure they are preserved and searched as the law requires. These records show that the “ethics reviews” of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest was a joke. JW supporters should be proud of how their support resulted in a lawsuit that helped force the disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s separate email system. And now we hope that it results in getting all the Clinton emails searched to find out what else Hillary Clinton didn’t want the American people to see about her shady dealings. Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit has become particularly noteworthy because it has been reported that the Clinton Foundation, now known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, accepted millions of dollars from at least seven foreign governments while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that a $500,000 donation it received from the government of Algeria while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of State violated a 2008 ethics agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. Some of the foreign governments that have made donations to the Clinton Foundation include Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, have questionable human rights records. Links to the full production of documents can be found here: May 4, 2015; June 15, 2015; July 27, 2015 and September 4, 2015. Feel free to review the documents and let us know if you find anything important that we might have missed!
What does it look like when the president of the United States is a desperate man for a deal? Does he have a platoon of legal eagles searching law and then writing executive orders to finesse the law? The order from the White House is ‘FIND A LOOPHOLE’.
FNC:James Rosen > Some senior U.S. officials involved in the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal have privately concluded that a key sanctions relief provision – a concession to Iran that will open the doors to tens of billions of dollars in U.S.-backed commerce with the Islamic regime – conflicts with existing federal statutes and cannot be implemented without violating those laws, Fox News has learned.
At issue is a passage tucked away in ancillary paperwork attached to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the Iran nuclear deal is formally known. Specifically, Section 5.1.2 of Annex II provides that in exchange for Iranian compliance with the terms of the deal, the U.S. “shall…license non-U.S. entities that are owned or controlled by a U.S. person to engage in activities with Iran that are consistent with this JCPOA.”
In short, this means that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies will, under certain conditions, be allowed to do business with Iran. The problem is that the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (ITRA), signed into law by President Obama in August 2012, was explicit in closing the so-called “foreign sub” loophole.
Indeed, ITRA also stipulated, in Section 218, that when it comes to doing business with Iran, foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent firms shall in all cases be treated exactly the same as U.S. firms: namely, what is prohibited for U.S. parent firms has to be prohibited for foreign subsidiaries, and what is allowed for foreign subsidiaries has to be allowed for U.S. parent firms.
What’s more, ITRA contains language, in Section 605, requiring that the terms spelled out in Section 218 shall remain in effect until the president of the United States certifies two things to Congress: first, that Iran has been removed from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and second, that Iran has ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development of weapons of mass destruction.
Additional executive orders and statutes signed by President Obama, such as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, have reaffirmed that all prior federal statutes relating to sanctions on Iran shall remain in full effect.
For example, the review act – sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee, and signed into law by President Obama in May – stated that “any measure of statutory sanctions relief” afforded to Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal may only be “taken consistent with existing statutory requirements for such action.” The continued presence of Iran on the State Department’s terror list means that “existing statutory requirements” that were set forth in ITRA, in 2012, have not been met for Iran to receive the sanctions relief spelled out in the JCPOA.
As the Iran deal is an “executive agreement” and not a treaty – and has moreover received no vote of ratification from the Congress, explicit or symbolic – legal analysts inside and outside of the Obama administration have concluded that the JCPOA is vulnerable to challenge in the courts, where federal case law had held that U.S. statutes trump executive agreements in force of law.
Administration sources told Fox News it is the intention of Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran’s foreign minister and five other world powers, that the re-opening of the “foreign sub” loophole by the JCPOA is to be construed as broadly as possible by lawyers for the State Department, the Treasury Department and other agencies involved in the deal’s implementation.
But the apparent conflict between the re-opening of the loophole and existing U.S. law leaves the Obama administration with only two options going forward. The first option is to violate ITRA, and allow foreign subsidiaries to be treated differently than U.S. parent firms. The second option is to treat both categories the same, as ITRA mandated – but still violate the section of ITRA that required Iran’s removal from the State Department terror list as a pre-condition of any such licensing.
It would also renege on the many promises of senior U.S. officials to keep the broad array of American sanctions on Iran in place. Chris Backemeyer, who served as Iran director for the National Security Council from 2012 to 2014 and is now the State Department’s deputy coordinator for sanctions policy, told POLITICO last month “there will be no real sanctions relief of our primary embargo….We are still going to have sanctions on Iran that prevent most Americans from…engaging in most commercial activities.”
Likewise, in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month, Adam Szubin, the acting under secretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, described Iran as “the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism” and said existing U.S. sanctions on the regime “will continue to be enforced….U.S. investment in Iran will be prohibited across the board.”
Nominated to succeed his predecessor at Treasury, Szubin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing the day after his speech to the Washington Institute. At the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) asked the nominee where the Obama administration finds the “legal underpinnings” for using the JCPOA to re-open the “foreign sub” loophole.
Szubin said the foreign subsidiaries licensed to do business with Iran will have to meet “some very difficult conditions,” and he specifically cited ITRA, saying the 2012 law “contains the licensing authority that Treasury would anticipate using…to allow for certain categories of activity for those foreign subsidiaries.”
Elsewhere, in documents obtained by Fox News, Szubin has maintained that a different passage of ITRA, Section 601, contains explicit reference to an earlier law – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the books since 1977 – and states that the president “may exercise all authorities” embedded in IEEPA, which includes licensing authority for the president.
However, Section 601 is also explicit on the point that the president must use his authorities from IEEPA to “carry out” the terms and provisions of ITRA itself, including Section 218 – which mandated that, before this form of sanctions relief can be granted, Iran must be removed from the State Department’s terror list. Nothing in the Congressional Record indicates that, during debate and passage of ITRA, members of Congress intended for the chief executive to use Section 601 to overturn, rather than “carry out,” the key provisions of his own law.
One administration lawyer contacted by Fox News said the re-opening of the loophole reflects circular logic with no valid legal foundation. “It would be Alice-in-Wonderland bootstrapping to say that [Section] 601 gives the president the authority to restore the foreign subsidiary loophole – the exact opposite of what the statute ordered,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations over implementation of the Iran deal.
At the State Department on Thursday, spokesman John Kirby told reporters Secretary Kerry is “confident” that the administration “has the authority to follow through on” the commitment to re-open the foreign subsidiary loophole.
“Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president has broad authorities, which have been delegated to the secretary of the Treasury, to license activities under our various sanctions regimes, and the Iran sanctions program is no different,” Kirby said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the G.O.P. presidential candidate who is a Harvard-trained lawyer and ardent critic of the Iran deal, said the re-opening of the loophole fits a pattern of the Obama administration enforcing federal laws selectively.
“It’s a problem that the president doesn’t have the ability wave a magic wand and make go away,” Cruz told Fox News in an interview. “Any U.S. company that follows through on this, that allows their foreign-owned subsidiaries to do business with Iran, will very likely face substantial civil liability, litigation and potentially even criminal prosecution. The obligation to follow federal law doesn’t go away simply because we have a lawless president who refuses to acknowledge or follow federal law.”
A spokesman for the Senate Banking Committee could not offer any time frame as to when the committee will vote on Szubin’s nomination.
In the months since the signing of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (which we will stubbornly continue to refer to here as “ITRA”), the Obama administration has worked to implement tougher sanctions against Iran. Although many of the ITRA regulations are not expected until early November, an Executive Order issued last week marked the beginning of a much stricter era of sanctions pursuant to ITRA, the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA), and the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA).
On October 9, 2012, sixty days after President Obama signed ITRA into law, he issued Executive Order No. 13,628, extending U.S. Iran sanctions to cover foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies, a prohibition that did not exist until promulgated in ITRA.[1] The Executive Order implements ITRA Section 218,[2] which we highlighted in our August 17, 2012 post, by providing that:
No entity owned or controlled by a United States person and established or maintained outside the United States may knowingly engage in any transaction, directly or indirectly, with the Government of Iran or any person subject to the jurisdiction of the Government of Iran, if that transaction would be prohibited by [the pre-existing Iran sanctions].
The Executive Order defines the term “entity” to mean “a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization.” This is a slight expansion of the definition provided by Congress in Section 218, which does not include the words “group” or “subgroup.” The resulting definition appears to authorize sanctions where any group “controlled by” a U.S. person, regardless of whether the group is formally incorporated, conducts prohibited Iran-related business.
The Executive Order gives no quarter for existing contracts, and authorizes standard Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) penalties against the U.S. person controlling the foreign entity. However, Subsection 4(c) of the Order provides that civil penalties shall not apply if the U.S. person divests or terminates its business with the foreign subsidiary not later than February 6, 2013.
The Order also directs that Secretaries of Treasury and State to issue regulations to implement several other provisions of ITRA (though the ITRA itself also directed the issuance of such regulations within 90 days of the effective date of the statute). Thus, Treasury regulations may be expected by around November 8, 2012 regarding several ITRA provisions, including the following:
Section 202, which requires the imposition of at least five ISA sanctions on any person who, on or after November 8, 2012, beneficially owns, operates, or controls a vessel that is used to transport crude oil from Iran to another country. This provision applies, however, only if the President determines under the National Defense Authorization Act that there is a sufficient supply of petroleum from countries other than Iran to permit petroleum purchasers to significantly reduce purchases from Iran;
Section 214, which increases the availability of sanctions on subsidiaries and agents of UN-sanctioned persons;
Section 215, which extends the availability of sanctions against persons connected to Iran’s weapons of mass destruction to any foreign financial institution who aids that person; and
Section 216 adds a new section to CISADA, expanding sanctions to apply to financial institutions connected to certain proliferation or terrorism activities of Iran or its National Guard.
In addition to the forthcoming regulations, the President is required to provide a great deal of information to Congress on and after November 8. Under section 211, the President must report to Congress on the identity of operators of vessels and persons that conduct or facilitate significant financial transactions that manage Iranian ports designated for sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Furthermore, the President must provide the identity of and the restrictions on individuals, including senior Iranian officials, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Officials, foreign persons supporting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and foreign government agencies carrying out transactions with certain Iran-affiliated persons.[3]
The Secretaries of Treasury and State also are required to report to the relevant Congressional committees on certain aspects of the implementation of ITRA. Under Section 206, the Secretary of State must brief Congress on the implementation of the ISA by November 8, 2012, and every 120 days thereafter. The Secretary of Treasury, pursuant to sections 216 and 220, must report to Congress on the implementation of sanctions on persons and entities who provide financial assistance to proliferation and terrorism activities.
The pace of Iran sanctions has accelerated rapidly in recent months and should be expected to continue to increase over the near and medium term. We will continue to provide our analysis of new developments here.
[1] On the same day the Executive Order was issued, OFAC issued a “Frequently Asked Questions” document providing guidance with regard to the Order.
[2] Sec. 218 – Liability of Parent Companies for Violations of Sanctions by Foreign Subsidiaries (requiring the President and the Secretary of Treasury to promulgate regulations within 60 days of enactment).
Listening to the hearing today with the CEO of Planned Parenthood is chilling. She is flanked by a set of lawyers and her responses are either non-responses, twisted replies or she does not have statistics or facts at hand.
A question was asked by a Democrat if abortion was legal, the response was ‘yes’. The follow up question was, ‘is an abortion a Constitutional right?’, the response by Richards was :YES! How can that be? Anyone?
Meanwhile, the Democrats on the House hearing panel continue to state the collection of videos are either fake or doctored. CEO, Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood has too admitted she has not seen the videos but states she has read the transcripts. In order to protect or defend her organization, why no see the videos in their entirety?
Additionally, the videos have been sent to an independent organization to determine forensic alterations. The verdict is below.
A forensic analysis of undercover videos about Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices are “authentic and show no evidence of manipulation or editing,” according to a report released Tuesday by Alliance Defending Freedom.
The analysis was completed by Coalfire, a digital security and forensics firm that has worked on civil and criminal investigations. The firm had access to all audio and video investigative footage recorded by the Center for Medical Progress.
“The Coalfire forensic analysis removes any doubt that the full length undercover videos released by Center for Medical Progress are authentic and have not been manipulated,” said Casey Mattox, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom. “Analysts scrutinized every second of video recorded during the investigation and released by CMP to date and found only bathroom breaks and other non-pertinent footage had been removed.”
According to the report, the videos only omit footage irrelevant to the allegations such as bathroom breaks.
“Planned Parenthood can no longer hide behind a smokescreen of false accusations,” Mattox said, “and should now answer for what appear to be the very real crimes revealed by the CMP investigation.”
“American taxpayer money should be redirected to fund local community health centers and not subsidize a scandal-ridden, billion-dollar abortion business,” Kerri Kupec, legal communications director for Alliance Defending Freedom said in a statement.
“Planned Parenthood is an organization that cares about one thing: making a profit at the expense of women’s health,” she added. “The investigative videos, whose authenticity was confirmed by the report, show that Planned Parenthood is an abortion-machine whose top executives and doctors haggle and joke about the harvesting and selling of baby body parts. Women deserve far better.”
Spokespersons for Planned Parenthood have denied illegal conduct. Last month, the organization commissioned their own analysis of the videos which claimed that the “edited” videos “have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that the firm hired by Planned Parenthood, Fusion GPS, has ties to the Democratic Party, including an effort to expose a group of eight private citizens who donated to a super PAC supporting former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
