Ed Royce: “I would just make the following points. We did have another way to transfer any agreed-upon settlement without…”

“I would just make the following points. We did have another way to transfer any agreed-upon settlement without transferring pallets of cash, and we know that because the administration had made other transfers to Iran. So this bill does not withdraw the U.S. from the Claims Tribunal or Algiers Accords. It doesn't impact that. Nor does it effectively prevent the United States from paying out awards rendered by the tribunal. As I have indicated, we simply, with this bill, prohibit cash from being used as a payment method. If the United States has to pay Iran a tribunal award in the future, the payment should be processed through the formal financial system as the other payments to Iran have been, and that is how the Hague Tribunal payments have been handled for 35 years, and that is how it should work in the future. But our sanctions system was designed with tribunal payments in mind. The Iran transaction sanctions regime contains a number of exemptions from the rules so that certain transactions can go forward, and, in this case, transactions for tribunal settlements are explicitly authorized and would shield any entity involved in such a transaction from liability under U.S. law. So going back to the original argument, we are trying to perfect the bill. But at the end of the day, we can't collapse the effort because we have now had three planeloads full of cash, with pallets of cash transferred to the regime, and we can bet Iran will angle for more.…”