During a portion of an interview with NBC News set to air on Thursday’s broadcast of “NBC Nightly News,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the $6 billion in Iranian assets unfrozen by a prisoner swap deal the Biden administration brokered was money Iran was allowed to accrue under the Trump administration and Iran has “always been allowed to use” these funds for humanitarian reasons, but “for technical reasons, Iran was having trouble actually using the funds,” and the Biden administration moved it to a different account, “where the money could actually be used, but under the supervision of our Treasury Department, only for humanitarian purposes.”
Blinken said, “The money in question, Iranian money, not American taxpayer dollars, is money that was allowed to accrue in a bank account from the sale of Iranian oil. And that mechanism, allowing Iran to accrue this money, to get the money and have it in an account, was established by the Trump administration. Now, the account that it was established in in South Korea, for technical reasons, Iran was having trouble actually using the funds, which it’s always been allowed to use for humanitarian purposes, under our sanctions, under our laws, we always carve out humanitarian, food, medicine, medical equipment. So, what we did is we moved the money from one account in South Korea, to another account in Qatar, where the money could actually be used, but under the supervision of our Treasury Department, only for humanitarian purposes. And not a dollar of that money has been spent to date. And we retain the right to freeze that account.”
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