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January 20th can’t come soon enough…

According to a report from The Washington Free Beacon, the Biden Administration had intel on a billion-dollar Iranian oil smuggling operation but decided to give Tehran a “free pass.”

From The Free Beacon:

Officials from the State Department, Treasury Department, and intelligence community received the 45-page intelligence report in April and sat for multiple briefs on its material. Assembled by a number of international intelligence agencies and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the report identified Iraq, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, as central to an Iranian “oil and fuel smuggling” operation that significantly expanded in 2022.

Iran generates roughly $1 billion from the smuggling scheme annually, Reuters reported, money that is “directly funding the Iranian threat network,” according to the intelligence report. The briefing on that report came just months after Iran-backed terror group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, sparking a war that later spread to Lebanon, where fellow Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah launches near-daily missile barrages at the Jewish state.

But the Biden-Harris administration apparently did little to act on the intelligence. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers and enforces trade sanctions, responded to the report by drawing up sanctions packages targeting Iraq—but never actually put them in place, according to a former U.S. official briefed on the matter.

The administration’s intimate knowledge of the smuggling operation has not been reported. It reflects a lax approach to Iran that has allowed the Islamic regime to rake in around $200 billion in illicit funds after Trump-era sanctions nearly bankrupted Tehran. And while Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah has crippled Iran’s terror proxies, Tehran’s financial resurgence could spark an early diplomatic confrontation when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House later this month.

“Despite Iran’s growing and dominant role in Iraq, the Biden administration has refused to sanction or meaningfully confront their role in an effort to protect the current Iraqi prime minister, Sudani, and to portray Iraq as a constructive regional partner,” said one official, who spoke to the WFB on background to discuss private briefings and deliberations.

“This approach deliberately ignores the reality that Iran and its proxies effectively control Iraq’s institutions, including the industrial fuel smuggling and crude commingling. It’s as if the Biden administration wants to hide the fact that Iraq remains Iran’s most important client state.”

More over at The Washington Free Beacon: