The Trump administration has just announced that they are imposing new sanctions on Iran after their recent attacks against Americans. Here’s the lowdown:
AXIOS – The U.S. announced additional sanctions against Iran on Friday, targeting “any individual owning, operating, trading with or assisting sectors of the Iranian economy, including construction, manufacturing, textiles and mining.”
The measures, announced at a rare White House briefing by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, come as tensions with Iran have de-escalated following its retaliatory strike on U.S. bases in Iraq earlier this week.
Iran is already under sanctions imposed by the Trump administration that impact more than 1,000 companies and individuals, per the Washington Post.
The costs of the sanctions have largely been pushed onto ordinary Iranians — an issue that spilled over into widespread protests last year — rather than the senior officials they target.
Mnuchin said there are also targeted at 17 of “Iran’s largest steel and iron manufacturers.”
There are also sanctions against eight senior Iranian officials, who Mnuchin said “advance the regime’s destabilizing activity and were involved in Tuesday’s ballistic missile strike.”
During the briefing Pompeo was questioned by a reporter about his recent comments regarding the US not knowing exactly when and where these attacks would happen, suggesting that ‘not knowing’ meant they weren’t imminent. Pompeo said they did have imminent information and added that these were a broad array of attacks being planned against many American facilities, not just one attack on our embassy:
MORE: Sec. Mike Pompeo: "We don't know exactly which day it would have been executed. But it was very clear: Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent." https://t.co/IqOEmqhu40 pic.twitter.com/A0KUWDzLCd
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) January 10, 2020
You can watch the full briefing below: