>>6262983

>definitely a person of interest..

(NK, IranDeal)

She was responsible for the sanctions on NK..but none of them have stopped North Korea’s nuclear tests.

Nor have they stopped North Korea’s production of bomb fuel.

Nor have they prevented what Obama described Friday as “an unprecedented campaign of ballistic missile launches,” including tests of both submarine-launched and intercontinental missiles.

What all the tough and tougher sanctions may well have achieved, however, is to leave North Korea even hungrier than usual for hard currency, and seeking with even more than its usual verve whatever illicit channels and connections might help compensate for the shortfalls.

Which brings us back to one of the world’s likeliest customers for Kim’s nuclear wares: Iran’s regime, North Korea’s longtime business partner, on which Obama early this year lavished $1.7 billion in cash for the settlement of a dispute pending for more than 30 years before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in the Hague.

Would Iran dare do anything as over-the-top outrageous as buying warheads from North Korea? It’s quite possible there has never been a safer or more enticing moment for it. Obama’s passion to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, apparently at all costs, means that should his administration come across any evidence of nuclear traffic between Iran and North Korea, the incentive would be to bury it. Confronting either party, especially if it led to public disclosure, could wreck Obama’s legacy Iran nuclear deal while he is still in office -- before it becomes the albatross of the next president.

Obama and his team have yet to provide a credible explanation of why Iran wanted the entire $1.7 billion paid in cash, or why, precisely, the administration kept the cash aspect and timing of the deliveries secret until details began to emerge more than six months later in the press.

But this we know: money is fungible, especially cash, which is hard to trace. It’s farcical for senior Obama administration officials to suggest, as they now have, that these air-shipped foreign banknotes were used mainly for domestic infrastructure projects. It would be quite odd for Iran to pay its local road-repair workers not in domestic rials, but in euros and Swiss banknotes. As for any badly needed benign imports, Iran’s government could more easily pay for those by keeping the hard currency abroad to cover the bills.

This February, President Hassan Rouhani’s vice president for planning and budget, Mohammad Bagher Nobakht Haghighi, told the Financial Times that Iran preferred to keep most of its newly unfrozen $100 billion abroad — specifically to help maintain a stable rial while paying Iran’s foreign bills. That story ran on Feb. 8, just three days after the last of the Obama administration’s $1.7 billion worth of cash shipments was airlifted to Iran.

It all makes a lot more sense if Iran’s aim was to parcel out the cash on its own turf, to be shipped back out for purposes Tehran might want to keep below the global radar. The question is not only whether this $1.7 billion, including some $1.3 billion taken from the pockets of American taxpayers, ended up in the hands of terrorists, but did any of it go to nuclear-testing North Korea?

https:// www.forbes.com/sites/claudiarosett/2016/09/10/could-iran-uses-its-1-7-billion-cash-jackpot-to-buy-north-korean-nukes/#668943573850