Category Archives: Treasury

Obama’s Climate Change Treaty or Accord, Skirts Senate

Posted on by

Obama’s Violating the Constitution by Not Submitting Climate Treaty to Senate

DailySignal/Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Mike Kelly:

Today at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of over 130 nations will sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement that was negotiated in Paris last December.

According to President Obama, this “historic agreement” will “hold every country accountable” if they fail to meet its carbon emission targets.

The White House has also acknowledged that the agreement contains “legally binding” provisions designed to create a “long-term framework” that will force the United States and signatory countries to reduce carbon emissions for decades to come.

Despite these facts, President Obama has already announced he will not submit the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate for advice and consent. Instead, the White House claims the signature environmental achievement of the president’s tenure is just an “international agreement” not meriting Senate attention.

If the stakes weren’t so high, this claim would be laughable on its face.

Not only was this agreement’s predecessor, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, submitted to the Senate and approved as a treaty, but when the Senate ratified that treaty, the Foreign Relations Committee specifically reported that any future emissions targets agreed to through the Convention “would have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent.”

President Obama has chosen to ignore this directive.

He has also chosen to ignore the State Department’s eight-factor test that is used to determine “whether any international agreement should be brought into force as a treaty or as an international agreement other than a treaty.”

Those eight factors are:

1) The extent to which the agreement involves commitments or risks affecting the nation as a whole (the agreement’s carbon reductions will inflict costs on every American who consumes energy)

2) Whether the agreement is intended to affect state laws (the agreement will force states to meet emission targets)

3) Whether the agreement can be given effect without the enactment of subsequent legislation by the Congress (Congress will have to appropriate money for the agreement’s Green Climate Fund)

4) Past U.S. practice as to similar agreements (the agreement’s predecessor was submitted as a treaty)

5) The preference of the Congress as to a particular type of agreement (Congress wants to vote on this agreement)

6) The degree of formality desired for an agreement (the agreement is a highly detailed 31-page document)

7) The proposed duration of the agreement, the need for prompt conclusion of an agreement, and the desirability of concluding a routine or short-term agreement (the agreement sets emissions targets decades in advance)

8) The general international practice as to similar agreements (there are many, but the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer is just one example)

The only reason President Obama is not sending the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate as a treaty is that he knows the Senate would handily reject it.

This is an unacceptable breach of Article II Section 2 of the Constitution, and Congress must do something about it.

That is why we have introduced a concurrent resolution in the House and Senate expressing the sense of Congress that the Paris Climate Agreement must be submitted to the Senate as a treaty for its advice and consent.

If President Obama fails to do so, then Congress must prevent its implementation by forbidding any payments to the agreement’s “Green Climate Fund,” an international slush fund included in the Paris agreement to induce developing nations to sign the agreement.

If Congress fails to specifically prohibit taxpayer money from being spent implementing the Paris Climate Agreement, then they will be complicit in President Obama’s subversion of the Constitution.


*****

More reading on the facts of the Accord, or whatever it is called that will not receive a Senate vote:

FAS: On April 22, 2016, as many as 155 countries intend to sign the new international Paris Agreement to address greenhouse-gas-induced climate change. No international agreement to date has attracted as many signatures on the opening day of the year-long signature period. Eight nations—all perceiving themselves as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change—plan to deposit their instruments of ratification as well.

Delegations of 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement on December 12, 2015. It creates a structure for nations to pledge every five years to abate their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, to adapt to climate change, and to cooperate to these ends, including financial and other support. A single framework to promote transparency and track progress of Parties’ efforts applies, for the first time, to all Parties—whether rich or poor. The Parties also adopted a Decision to

give effect to the Paris Agreement. Both the Decision and the Agreement (hereinafter capitalized) are intended to be legally binding on Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the new Agreement, respectively, though not all provisions within them are mandatory. Both are subsidiary to the UNFCCC, which the United States ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate (Treaty Document 102-38, October 7, 1992).

The UNFCCC entered into force in 1994.

Whether the new Paris Agreement or Decision would require Senate advice and consent depends on the content of the agreements. If either were to contain new legal obligations on the United States, it would favor requiring Senate consent to ratification. However, the United States and other Parties to the UNFCCC accepted many legally binding obligations when they ratified the Convention, including control of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, preparation to adapt to climate change, international cooperation and support, and regular reporting of emissions and actions with international review. Some have argued that the Paris Agreement does not require more of the United States than it is already obligated to do under the UNFCCC, while others have argued that it does.

Purpose and Post-2050 Balance of Emissions and Removals

The agreement states that it aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.

This purpose is stated as enhancing the implementation of the UNFCCC, including its objective to stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a level to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. In order to achieve this “long-term temperature goal,” Parties aim to make their GHG emissions peak as soon as possible and then to reduce them rapidly “so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” In other words, the Agreement envisions achieving net zero anthropogenic emissions. While this is arguably synonymous with the UNFCCC’s objective of stabilizing GHG atmospheric concentrations, the Agreement puts a timeframe on the objective for the first time. However, as a collective objective, the Agreement provides no means to hold an individual Party accountable if the objective were not met.

Mitigation and Adaptation

The Agreement and Decision establish a single framework under which all Parties would:

communicate every five years and undertake “ambitious” Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to mitigating GHG emissions, participate in a single “transparency framework” that includes communicating their GHG inventories and implementation of their obligations, including financial support provided or received, not less than biennially (with exceptions to a few, least developed states), and be subject to international review of their implementation.

All Parties will eventually be subject to common procedures and guidelines. However, while developed country Parties (not defined) must provide NDCs stated as economy-wide, absolute GHG reduction targets, developing country Parties are exhorted to enhance their NDCs and move toward similar targets over time, in light of their national circumstances.

Further, flexibility in the transparency framework is allowed to developing countries, depending on their capacities, regarding the scope, frequency, and detail of their reporting. The administrative Secretariat of the Convention will record the NDCs and other key reports in a public registry.

The Agreement also requires “as appropriate” that Parties prepare and communicate their plans to adapt to climate change. Adaptation communications, too, will be recorded in a public registry.

A committee will, in a facilitative and non-punitive manner, address compliance issues under the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement contains provisions for voluntary withdrawal of Parties.

The Agreement permits Parties voluntarily to participate in cooperative approaches (implicitly, emissions markets) that “involve the use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes.”

Finance

The Agreement reiterates the obligation in the UNFCCC to provide financial support to developing country Parties to implement their mitigation efforts, calling for it to be continuous and enhanced. It uses exhortatory language to restate the collective pledge in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, of $100 billion annually by 2020, and calls for a “progression beyond previous efforts.” For the first time under the UNFCCC, the Agreement encourages all Parties to provide financial support. In addition, in the Decision, the Parties agreed to set, prior to their 2025 meeting, a new, collective, quantified goal for mobilizing financial resources of not less than $100 billion annually to assist developing country Parties. The Decision strongly urges developed country Parties to scale up their current financial support—in particular to significantly increase their support for adaptation. The Agreement recognizes that “enhanced support” will allow for “higher ambition” in the actions of developing country Parties.

Five-Year Assessments

In 2023 and every five years thereafter, the Parties are to perform a “global stocktake” to review implementation of the Paris Agreement and progress toward the purpose of the Agreement and the long-term net zero anthropogenic emissions goal.

 

IRS: Tracking Cell Phones, Billions in Fraud Refunds

Posted on by

IRS Can Track Your Cell Phone, but Leaves Billions in Taxes Uncollected

DailySignal: While the Internal Revenue Service continues to leave uncollected tax money on the table, the agency beefed up its surveillance capabilities in a move that alarms both conservative and liberal privacy advocates.

Now some complain the IRS is acting too much like Big Brother and not enough like a traditional taxman.

Since 2006, the IRS has overseen an annual tax gap—the shortfall between taxes owed and collected—of about $385 billion, government analysts say. And according to an April report, the agency has not implemented 70 of 112 actions identified by the Government Accountability Office to close that loop.

In 2009, though, the IRS purchased a “cell-site simulator,” more commonly known as Stingray technology. And since November, the agency has been trying to buy another of the devices.

Like something from a spy movie, a Stingray device mimics a cellphone tower, tricking all mobile phones in an area into revealing their location and numbers. Authorities can deploy the powerful technology to tag and track an individual’s location in real time.

More advanced versions of the devices can be used to copy information stored on a cellphone and to download malware remotely.

The devices are as controversial as they are prevalent. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 61 agencies in 23 states and the District of Columbia own the devices.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says the IRS uses its Stingray to hunt down fraudsters and stop money laundering. The agency’s use of the devices remained a secret until an October report in the Guardian.

In a November letter to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, Koskinen wrote that the agency’s technology “cannot be used to intercept the content of real-time communications” such as voicemails, text messages, and emails. Instead, the IRS chief said, the device has been used “to track 37 phone numbers.”

And the IRS commissioner insists his agency deploys the tech only in accordance with state and federal laws.

But during an April 13 hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the deputy IRS commissioner for service and enforcement, John Dalrymple, couldn’t say whether the IRS obtained a warrant before activating the device.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, says he finds that concerning.

With a federal budget deficit projected at $544 billion in 2016, Jordan told The Daily Signal he’d rather have the IRS focus on “their fundamental job, which is to collect revenue due to the federal Treasury.” He added:

The GAO has 112 things they suggest, recommendations for the IRS to actually deal with the $385 billion dollar tax gap. Not one of those recommendations was to purchase a second Stingray unit.

More than a misappropriation of resources, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus said, he fears the IRS could abuse the technology to monitor political groups like it did in 2013, when the agency began targeting conservative nonprofits.

“Now you have this same agency, who again for a long period of time went after people for exercising their First Amendment free speech rights, are using this technology and without a Fourth Amendment probable cause warrant,” Jordan said.

Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the technology poses a significant threat even when gathering basic information like names and numbers. In an interview with The Daily Signal, Wessler said Stingray devices could be “quite chilling on people’s right to protest.”

And there’s already a precedent for misconduct, albeit at a more local level.

Wessler points to a 2003 incident when the Miami-Dade Police Department purchased a Stingray device to monitor a protest of a conference on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. According to an expense report obtained by the ACLU, police wanted the device because they “anticipated criminal activities.”

“It’s a pretty short step from those words to being concerned about the police intentionally downloading a list of every protester who shows up at some demonstration,” Wessler said. “It’s a powerful way to know who’s there.”

The IRS Criminal Investigations Division is already one of the more elite investigative agencies. Koskinen boasts that in 2015 the division achieved a 93.2 percent conviction rate, “the highest in all of federal law enforcement.”

It’s an open question whether the agency needs Stingray technology to complete its mission.

The IRS did not respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment made by emails and phone calls.

Paul Larkin argues that the nature of IRS investigations makes real-time intelligence irrelevant. Larkin, senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that IRS agents are following a paper trail to investigate previous crimes:

There is no good reason the IRS would ever need real-time data information. The crimes that the IRS investigates all occurred in the past. They’re investigating fraud against the government that’s already happened. They don’t have crimes in progress like a burglary.

But if the IRS ever needed to track a suspect in the moment, Larkin said, there’s a practical solution—teamwork. He explains that there’s “no legal hurdle” that prohibits the IRS from teaming up, for instance, with the Department of Justice and borrowing its Stingray technology.

Jordan says he isn’t ready to accept that the IRS ever needs access to the device.

“Really, should the IRS have this and be using this at all?” the Ohio Republican said. “I tend to think you’d be better off with this technology not being in their hands.”

******

The 23-page report is actually quite readable, and worth looking at if you’ve been a victim of identity theft or refund fraud, you’re a tax preparer, or you’re interested in the future of how Americans file our taxes.

  1. The IRS paid out $3.1 billion in refunds to scammers last year. We’ve discussed in the past how this scam works: someone with basic information about a U.S. taxpayer files a return with fake information, depositing their refund in the scammer’s own account. It’s a sophisticated operation and very lucrative. Additional 5 items are here, a must read from the Consumerist.

Comrade Ayatollah, it Always Points Back to Russia/USSR

Posted on by

 

“Is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a graduate of the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow? Did the KGB recruit Khamenei as a spy in the 1960’s? Is Soviet indoctrination and ideological training to blame for Khamenei’s hatred of the United States? The Persian blogosphere is boiling over with speculations about Khamenei’s alleged Soviet connections. The affair started Wednesday, as Iranian bloggers discovered Russia Today’s February 5, 2010 report on the 50th anniversary of the People’s Friendship University in Moscow, in which Khamenei is mentioned among the university’s “most notable graduates.” A claim also appears on Russia Today’s website, although the reference is made to “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini,” an obvious mistake. Subsequently, Iranian bloggers identified other Russian sources making the very same claim: The November 25, 2003 issue of Kommersant presents Khamenei as a People’s Friendship University graduate…………….”

Patrice Lumumba University was named after the murdered first Congolese prime minister after independence from Belgium. Lumumba was allegedly killed by Congolese rivals and Western intelligence services. I believe that to be true: Lumumba was perceived as a ‘communist’ by the West during the peak of the Cold War. The Soviet university attracted many third world students, and it is possible that a young Khamenei was among them, but it is highly unlikely. I doubt it very much: he must have started as a student of Islamic faith at a young age. Or maybe he was groomed as a communist mole inside Qom, a potential Manchurian Ayatollah. If true this would mean that Khamenei also speaks Russian in addition to Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. He is as much a communist as the Saudi Mufti is a secret Shi’a, as much as Bashar al-Assad is a Salafi.

  

Introduction:

For close to a century, destiny has played a bitter game with our ancient homeland. The winds of bizarre events have left us Iranians in a historical abeyance. Addicted to our shared agony and engrossed in our daily demise, we have even lost the ability to ponder the starting point of this common grief. Perhaps if our fathers sought out the root of this shared agony, a feasible solution would have emerged. What you are about to read is the result of two decades of chasing after questions that have perplexed me for half of my life. Finally when I started writing this book four years ago, I anticipated many possible outcomes. I expected this book to evolve into the biography of a ruthless dictator or the discovery of an old Soviet espionage network. But in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that Comrade Ayatollah would turn into perhaps one of the largest research collections that sheds light on the darkest political and criminal dossiers in Iranian history. Today I declare with certainty that I have identified the root of the historical agony of our people and I have no doubt that all those who follow me on this journey to the conclusion of the book will acquire a new viewpoint on what has come to pass in our nation during the past century. The key to identifying the root cause of this shared agony lies not in our country but far away in the heart of Iran’s Northern neighbor — in the vast nation of Russia. The same place where in 1905 sparks of revolution were ignited in Tsarist Russia. Twelve years later, the flames of the Bolshevik Revolution at first engulfed the people of this expansive country and then spread to ancient Iran and other parts of the world to reduce their history, culture and identity to ashes.

Comrade Ayatollah investigates in ten chapters documents related to the pivotal role of the Soviet Union’s security agency in the planning and execution of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and this terrifying organization’s subsequent covert facilitation of the ascent of Seyed Ali Khamenei to the position of Absolute Supreme Leader in Iran. In each of these ten chapters you will encounter one of the hidden secrets and terrifying mysteries in the history of the Islamic Revolution. While deciphering these enigmas, I also provide material for independent research and a suggested topic for case studies.

The first chapter is a review of the history of the Cold War the origins of which can be traced back to the rivalry between two victors of World War I — the Russians and the British — for the control of the partitioned Ottoman territory. The Ottomans were the big losers of the war and the most prized spoils of war left behind by their defeated army were the historic lands of the Middle East and North Africa. The Bolshevik Revolution that coincided with the end of World War I kept the Russians from controlling a part of this valuable territory and thus Great Britain and France remained the two powers that won control over the lion’s share of the Middle East. After the 1917 revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the Russians once again began eyeing territories outside the boundaries of this newly established empire.

Their creeping influence accelerated in the former Ottoman territories, from Mesopotamia to Palestine and from Morocco to Egypt. With the advent of World War II, the Russian and the British armies entered Iran from the north and south, respectively, and occupied the entire country with the excuse that Iran was a supporter of Nazi Germany. The clandestine influx of the Soviet intelligence service’s spies and agents under the guise of the Red Army provided the opportunity for the Russians to penetrate all strata of society in the broad geographical expanse of Iran. At the end of World War II, the British army immediately began to withdraw. The Soviet Red Army months later under international pressure especially from the United States withdrew, but its intelligence service’s spies never left Iran. The result of their three-decade long operations in Iran to  recruit and train elements loyal to the Soviet Union was the December 1979 Islamic Revolution. What transpired during this bitter era in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa has been depicted in this chapter.

The second chapter details the names of some of the powerful political figures who were trained in Moscow by the Soviet intelligence service for the roles they would play during the days leading up to the revolution and the years that followed, along with their respective biographies highlighting the services they rendered to the Russians. All this information is based on secret documents that are published for the first time in this book. We will see that all three influential factions in the Islamic Republic’s closed political circle in the past three decades have been in the service of Soviet intelligence. Seyed Ali Khamenei who leads the conservative or hardliners’ faction, Seyed Mohammad Moussavi Khoeiniha who is the spiritual father of the Reformist faction, and some of Mahmoud Amadinejad’s closest advisors including Kamran Daneshjoo, Mahmoud Mollabashi and Arsalan Ghorbani who comprise the neo-conservative faction are all graduates of the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the official international spy training center for the Russians since 1960.

Read more here if you have the courage for history.

Europe Tells Obama AGAIN to Mind your Own Business

Posted on by

The vote is very….very close so far.

CNNMoney: U.K. citizens worldwide will vote in the historic referendum on June 23. Prime Minister David Cameron will campaign for the U.K. to stay in the EU. The British economy is the second largest in the EU. Its decision on whether to stay or go will have big implications not only for the people of the U.K. but also global financial markets and the future of Europe. More here.

‘Monstrous interference’: UK pols furious at Obama’s plan to intervene in EU debate

FNC: President Obama looks set to wade into the contentious debate in the United Kingdom over whether or not the nation should remain a member of the European Union – and some Brits are angry at the president’s intrusion into a delicate UK issue ahead of a major vote.

Obama will arrive in London late Thursday for a three-day trip. On Friday he will meet Prime Minister David Cameron — who is reportedly keen to get Obama’s backing ahead of the June 23 referendum, in which Britons will choose to remain or leave the European Union.

Cameron is in a difficult position, backing the “Remain” campaign, while many within his own Conservative Party are campaigning for the “Leave” or “Brexit” (British-Exit) campaign. Polls have shows the race is tight, with the Remain campaign holding an edge as small as one percent.

The White House has said Obama is willing to offer his opinion and may announce that he favors Cameron’s position – that Britain should remain in the European Union.

“If he’s asked his view as a friend, he will offer it,” U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said. “As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union.”

Those calling for Britain to leave the European Union are not happy at that news, with U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage saying Obama should stay home.

‘A monstrous interference,” Farage told Fox News Thursday. “I’d rather he stayed in Washington, frankly, if that’s what he’s going to do.”

“You wouldn’t expect the British Prime Minister to intervene in your presidential election, you wouldn’t expect the Prime Minister to endorse one candidate or another. Perhaps he’s another one of those people who doesn’t understand what [the EU] is,” Farage said.

In March, a letter sent from Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Liam Fox, and co-signed by over 100 MPs from four different political parties, asked the U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. to persuade Obama not to intervene, calling any such intervention “extremely controversial and potentially damaging.”

“It has long been the established practice not to interfere in the domestic political affairs of our allies and we hope that this will continue to be the case,” the letter to Ambassador Matthew Barzun read.

“While the current U.S. administration may have a view on the desirability or otherwise of Britain’s continued membership of the E.U., any explicit intervention in the debate is likely to be extremely controversial and potentially damaging,” the letter said.

London Mayor Boris Johnson — who was born in New York and has expressed strong support for the UK-U.S. relationship — accused Obama of hypocrisy.

“I just think it’s paradoxical that the United States, which wouldn’t dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate,” Johnson said Tuesday.

Cameron however, has said that the advice of allies was welcome, saying “listening to what our friends say in the world is not a bad idea.”

“I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country that thinks we should leave,” he said Wednesday.

***** For the explanation of the referendum and graphics by The Economist, go here.

On Iran, Obama Unwound Carter’s Action

Posted on by

It all started with the Iranian hostages, then the Beirut bombings. President Jimmy Carter gave the order to freeze all accessible Iranian assets including military equipment. And so it was done, but Madeline Albright began to pull the threat on behalf of Iran, and Barack Obama continued to do the same in 2009.

There are countless moving parts here, so it is for sure convoluted so perhaps the bullet points here will help. A calculator may be good too.

  • The Supreme Court decided today in a 6-2 ruling on behalf of the victims to free up close to $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets—held in a New York bank for Iran’s central bank, Bank Markazi—to compensate more than 1,000 victims and family members harmed in terrorism incidents traceable to Iran, including the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Lebanon.   
  • In 2000, in her speech on Friday, March 17, the U.S. Secretary of State, Mrs. Albright, made reference to the Iranian assets that the United States froze in the aftermath of the hostage crisis in 1979. It always had been that any normalization of relations between these two countries had to consider the unfreezing of the Iranian assets. What was never clear was the size and nature of the assets. In her speech, Mrs. Albright indicated that much of the frozen assets were turned over to Iran after 1981. Yet, she also intimated that there is more that was not turned over. The size of the remaining frozen assets has been one mystery. Their nature and location, too, are not clear. At the time of the freeze, reports indicated that the assets consisted of goods purchased by Iran and not delivered by the suppliers, including military supplies, cash and securities on deposit or in trust with various U.S. banks and financial institutions here and their branches and subsidiaries abroad, stock and bonds of United States issuers, real estate, right to interest, dividend, and distribution, contract rights, and other proprietary interests. Read the rest of the shocking summary here.
  • To dovetail the second bullet point above, today, Daily Beast published an item that explains why the legislation introduced to punish Saudi Arabia for any involvement in the 9/11 attacks on the United States should be avoided as noted by some key officials at the Pentagon. Why you ask, the historical house of the United States is not clean either, which too is further explained in the link of the second bullet item. This is for sure still up for debate, however, there are major indications that during Barack Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia, he is likely reassuring the KSA he will veto any punishing legislation. 
  • We can fully know at all exactly where or how much Iranian money resides in banks around the world and how is brokering business on behalf of Iran, investing for the rogue country, much less skirting sanctions for them as well. You see even China had/has ownership of $22 billion of Iranian funds mostly due to sanctions and to pay for oil. 
  • In 2009, enter Barack Obama and $2 billion for Iran just to come to the table. WSJ:  ” More than $2 billion allegedly held on behalf of Iran in Citigroup Inc. C 2.43 % accounts were secretly ordered frozen last year by a federal court in Manhattan, in what appears to be the biggest seizure of Iranian assets abroad since the 1979 Islamic revolution.  The legal order, executed 18 months ago by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is under seal and hasn’t been made public. The court acted in part because of information provided by the U.S. Treasury Department.President Barack Obama has pledged to enact new economic sanctions on Iran at year-end if Tehran doesn’t respond to international calls for negotiations over its nuclear-fuel program. The frozen $2 billion stands at the center of an intensifying legal struggle between Luxembourg’s Clearstream Banking S.A., the holder of the Citibank account, and the families of hundreds of U.S. Marines killed or injured in a 1983 terrorist attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Clearstream is primarily a clearing house for financial trades and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Börse AG. Luxembourg’s bank secrecy laws have helped it grow into a major European financial center.” More here from the WSJ.  
  • So what about this Clearstream Banking operation you say? Well they were a nefarious operation as well. In 2014, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a $152 million agreement with Clearstream Banking, S.A. (Clearstream), of Luxembourg, to settle its potential civil liability for apparent violations surrounding Clearstream’s use of its omnibus account with a U.S. financial institution as a conduit to hold securities on behalf of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). More here from Treasury.   
  • In January 2016, The U.S. State Department announced the government had agreed to pay Iran $1.7 billion to settle a case related to the sale of military equipment prior to the Iranian revolution, according to a statement issued on Sunday.
    Iran had set up a $400 million trust fund for such purchases, which was frozen along with diplomatic relations in 1979. In settling the claim, which had been tied up at the Hague Tribunal since 1981, the U.S. is returning the money in the fund along with “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest,” the statement said.
  • Wait, there is the other $100 billion: That’s roughly how much the U.S. Treasury Department says Iran stands to recover once sanctions are lifted under the new nuclear deal.

We cant know if there is more, yet no wonder Iran is dancing in the streets and maintains threatening behavior where Obama continues to tell the region, get along with Iran….they are legitimate. Oh….Obama is working on a personal meeting with Rouhani too.

Intense U.S.-Iran negotiations appear to be underway at this time, on various levels. They have included meetings this week in New York between Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State Kerry, and an April 14 Washington meeting between Central Bank of Iran governor Valiollah Seif and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew.[1] According to an April 19 report on the Iranian website Sahamnews.org, which is affiliated with Iran’s Green Movement, President Obama asked to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rohani in two secret letters sent in late March to both Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Rohani. According to the report, Obama wrote in the letters that Iran has a limited-time opportunity to cooperate with the U.S. in order to resolve the problems in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and promised that if Iran agreed to a meeting between him and Rohani, he would be willing to participate in any conference to this end. The Sahamnews report further stressed that Supreme Leader Khamenei discussed the request with President Rohani, that Rohani said that Iran should accept the request and meet with Obama, and that such a meeting could lead to an end to the crises in the region while increasing Iran’s influence in their resolution. Rohani promised Khamenei that any move would be coordinated with him and reported to him. According to the report, Khamenei agreed with Rohani. The Sahamnews report also emphasized that Khamenei’s recent aggressively anti-U.S. speeches were aimed at maintaining an anti-U.S. atmosphere among the Iranian public, whereas in private meetings he expresses a different position. Courtesy and more from MEMRI here.