Having watched the presidential debate at 4 AM Friday in my Raanana home (now, that’s dedication!), I certainly understand the Democratic party’s scrambling for a substitute after what looked at best as Donald Trump debating his half-dead grandfather – even though the president is only four years older than the former president. But don’t rely on me, here’s what Peter Baker, writing for the Democratic bastion a.k.a. The New York Times, had to say:
Over the course of 90 minutes, a raspy-voiced Mr. Biden struggled to deliver his lines and counter a sharp though deeply dishonest former President Donald J. Trump, raising doubts about the incumbent president’s ability to wage a vigorous and competitive campaign four months before the election. Rather than dispel concerns about his age, Mr. Biden, 81, made it the central issue.
Now, since I work for The Jewish Press, I was tuning in to the Jewish and Israeli notes of the debate, and the most crushing one came at the very end, in Trump’s closing comments. Here’s the CNN transcript:
TRUMP: Like so many politicians, this man is just a complainer. He said we want to do this. We want to do that. We want to get rid of this tax, that tax, but he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t do.
All he does is make our country unsafe by allowing millions and millions of people to pour in. Our military doesn’t respect him. We look like fools in Afghanistan.
We didn’t stop – Israel, it was such a horrible thing that would have never happened. It should have never happened.
Iran was broke. Anybody that did business with Iran, including China, they couldn’t do business with the United States. They all passed.
Iran was broke. They had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah, for terror, no money whatsoever.
Again, Ukraine should have never happened.
Trump continued, and this time touched the sensibilities of all his Jewish and pro-Israel audience:
He talks about all this stuff, but he didn’t do it. For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell. We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place.
You talk about Charlottesville. This is 100 times Charlottesville, 1,000 times.
The whole country is exploding because of you, because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world.
Earlier in the debate, Trump spoke about his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, insisting that, had he been in charge, neither the Ukraine invasion nor the Hamas atrocities would have happened:
When Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never. Just like Israel would have never been invaded in a million years by Hamas. You know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror.
That’s why you had no terror at all during my administration. This place, the whole world is blowing up under him.
Asked about the Hamas attack, Biden responded with what sounded like a combination of stream of consciousness and old man chasing the neighborhood kids off his lawn:
BIDEN: Number one, everyone from the United Nations Security Council straight through to the G7 to the Israelis and Netanyahu himself have endorsed the plan I put forward, endorsed the plan I put forward, which has three stages to it.
The first stage is to treat the hostages for a ceasefire. Second phase is a ceasefire with additional conditions. The third phase is know the end of the war. The only one who wants the war to continue is Hamas, number one. They’re the only ones standing down.
We’re still pushing hard from – to get them to accept. In the meantime, what’s happened in Israel? We’re finally – the only thing I’ve denied Israel was 2,000-pound bombs. They don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people. We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them. And by the way, I’m the guy that organized the world against Iran when they had a full-blown kind of ballistic missile attack on Israel. No one was hurt. No one Israeli was accidentally killed. And it stopped. We saved Israel. We are the biggest producer of support for Israel than anyone in the world. And so, that’s – they are two different things.
Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden. You don’t have to do it. And by the way, they’ve been greatly weakened, Hamas, greatly weakened, and they should be. They should be eliminated. But, you got to be careful for what you use these certain weapons among population centers.
Not what you would call rousing rhetoric.
Of course, as many have pointed out, the fact that a fundamental rule for the debate was that the candidates’ statements could not be fact-checked made the whole thing an assembly of unverified platform snippets. For Trump, who spews “untruths” at an Olympic rate, this made it his home turf. He went as far as to deny having a sexual relationship with a porn star – only a few weeks after having been found guilty of concealing the hush money he paid her.
So, I felt compelled to verify Trump’s statement about the Iran sanctions, at VerifyThis.com.
Iran recently accessed approximately $6 billion, as reported by Verify in October 2023. This sum isn’t a direct payment from the US government but rather represents funds owed by South Korea to Iran for oil and gas purchases. The transaction had been halted mid-process due to U.S. sanctions. As part of negotiations for a prisoner release, the U.S. agreed in September to unfreeze these funds, permitting their transfer to an account in Qatar.
The “$6 billion” to Iran controversy stems from a complex series of events involving US-Iran relations and international oil trade.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, reinstating sanctions on Iran. To prevent global oil price spikes, the U.S. granted temporary waivers to eight countries, including South Korea, allowing them to continue purchasing Iranian oil without facing penalties.
South Korea resumed buying billions in Iranian oil and gas. However, when these waivers expired in 2019, the Trump administration chose not to renew them. This left approximately $6 billion in limbo – money South Korea owed Iran for oil purchases but couldn’t transfer due to the risk of U.S. sanctions.
The funds remained frozen until September 2023, when the Biden administration negotiated a deal for the release of five American prisoners in Iran. As part of this agreement, the US facilitated the transfer of the $6 billion from South Korean banks to a Qatari bank via European intermediaries, guaranteeing that these banks wouldn’t face U.S. sanctions for the transaction.
After the transfer, Iran gained access to the funds, but with restrictions. The Biden administration emphasized that the money, held in a Qatari account, would be closely monitored and limited to humanitarian uses only.
However, following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, the US government requested that Qatar temporarily freeze Iranian access to these funds. Qatar complied with this request.
Treasury Department and National Security Council officials have publicly confirmed that Iran has not utilized any of the $6 billion. In their words, “not a penny has been spent.”
