Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday June 7th 2018.

I am John Poghoritz the editor of commentary this 70 something year old monthly of intellectual analysis political,

property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective we invite you to join us at commentary magazine.com

where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe 1995 for a digital subscription.

29 95 for an all access subscription including a beautiful monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year with me as always eight green

wall senior either high eight hi John no a Rothman associate or I know I John and senior writer Sora Marie high

Sora hello John so we just spent two hours having a dorm room bull session I haven't been lived in a dorm since 1979

so just to give you a sense of my dorm room bull session there was probably you know Zenyatta mandada by the police

playing and a lot of cigarettes being smoked and a lot of very pretentious conversation about play

and Aristotle and Leo Strauss so at mostly I think what we were doing we started out by talking about Iran and North Korea

in the sense that we have this disturbing news about the Obama administration and how it handled secretly handled financial

set of potential financial transactions from Iran in 2016 that we can get to and then also the question of what the nuclear negotiation with Iran tells us about what kind of possible

nuclear negotiation we might see next week in Singapore when Donald Trump goes to meet Kim Jong Un at the once off now on again summit.

So Rob maybe you want to sort of fill us in on the Iran scandal that was revealed apparently I think by the associated press right was yes it was the associated press that reported at scandal is exactly right well it was congressional

republicans are senate republicans who released this report and AP got the scoop and the gist of it is that after the Iran deal was signed in July 2015

Iran continued to be denied access to the US financial system in other words the fact that they got the deal didn't mean that it would now Iran would now be able to touch the US financial markets it was supposed to continue to be barred

and numerous administration officials including including then treasury secretary jack lou his various deputies all repeatedly told members of congress that because of various reasons you don't want Iran to be touching the US financial system and we will ensure that that continues to be the case

because Iran is one of the world's worst actors for money laundering concern now it turns out that in February 2016 so this would be seven eight months after the deal was signed in fact the US offered to help the Iranians convert some money they had it with the

money central bank in on money reels into euros and in order to do that they would first have to convert them to dollars because the the on money real is a very difficult currency to concern to convert and so you would have to get

dollars first before they can eventually be turned into euros that middle step from on money reels into dollars would involve Iran essentially touching the US

financial system in violation of existing sanctions and in violation of what the Obama administration had told congress nevertheless secretly the Obama administration issued a special license to allow Iran to do this and it actually encouraged press to US banks to do the transaction

and the two banks declined to do it because they were afraid of what it would mean after the fact either morally legally both

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