Sen. Portman Calls for Transparency in Agreements with Iran, NKorea

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Thursday that future agreements with Iran and North Korea should be more transparent following a report on the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, which Portman chairs, wrote in a draft report released Wednesday that the Obama administration "issued a license to Bank Muscat to authorize the conversion of Iran’s rials to euros through ‘any United States depository institution …,'"  as part of the nuclear deal with Iran. "Even after the specific license was issued, U.S. government officials maintained in congressional testimony that Iran would not be granted access to the U.S. financial system."

Portman said in an interview with CNN on Thursday that "in the future, whether it is another agreement [with Iran] ... [or] whether it is an agreement with North Korea, which I hope we will end up with at some point… we need to be sure that Congress and the American people are told."

Jarrett Blanc, a former State Department official who coordinated the Iran deal’s implementation, described the report as "widely overblown," to CNN, adding that "this is the kind of work the US Government needs to do every day to make our sanctions regimes effective without creating such burdens on allies and partners that they are pushed to work around our financial dominance."

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