Iranian Leadership Asset Transparency Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this bill, with all due respect to my friends, Mr. Poliquin and Mr. Hill.

The Iranian Leadership Asset Transparency Act is one of those bills that sounds like a good idea. And I am sure many of my colleagues are thinking, Why not? Transparency is a good thing. The Iranian regime is a bad thing. Let's support this thing. What could possibly go wrong?

I have a couple of points to make in that respect. The first one is that--again, with all due respect to my friends on the other side--this bill, if it is intended to get at the wealth of the Iranian leadership, will fail, and it will fail in an embarrassing and spectacular and almost laughable fashion.

The reason I say that, of course, is that the bill specifies that the estimated total funds or assets held in accounts at U.S. and foreign financial institutions shall be enumerated. Funds are defined as cash, equity, and bonds.

So if we pass this bill, we are going to know that the Supreme Leader has a thousand shares of IBM down at the local Merrill Lynch office. But European real estate, private jets, boats, piles of gold bars, stacks of unrefined heroin, Swiss watches, shell businesses in South America, we won't know about any of them.

I ask my colleagues: How many shares of IBM do you think the Iranian regime has down at the local Merrill Lynch office?

Probably not a lot. We froze their assets for a very, very long time.

This bill, if it passes, will get at some tiny fraction of the wealth of the Iranian regime in a way that will, frankly, embarrass our country because we will show how little we know, which brings me to the second problem I have with this bill.

As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I am very concerned about what this bill would do with respect to disclosing or at least pointing at our sources and methods for intelligence gathering.

I think there are probably very few assets of the kinds captured by this bill in U.S. banks or banks that we would have ready access to in Europe, but I am not so sure there aren't perhaps cash or securities in Albanian, Pakistani, or Russian banks. If we enumerate those assets, we will be inevitably pointing at a capacity we may or may not have to determine what is going on inside those banks. I would suggest that this bill does not provide nearly enough good to put at risk the sources and methods of our intelligence gathering.

We know what is happening here. This bill is an installment in the relentless attempt by the majority to tank the Iranian nuclear bill. Look, we can disagree over whether that bill was a good idea. Certainly, we did. But the fact is--and I say this as a member of the Intelligence Committee--it is working. Iran is in compliance with their nuclear obligations.

The Prime Minister of Israel stood in the General Assembly a couple of years ago and had a little drawing of a bomb and said: We are 2 to 3 months away from breakout.

Today we are probably 12 to 15 months away from an Iranian nuclear breakout, in the worst case scenario. Yet the Republican majority, in this latest installment, wants to make that go away. Moreover, they do that without a backup plan.

If they succeed in tanking this bill and we are right back where we were a year ago, 2 to 3 months away from breakout, what then?

We are isolated. We have lost the moral high ground and we are probably a lot closer to another war in the Middle East. I don't understand that.

So think about where we wind up if the majority succeeds. We would be isolated, we would be closer to war, and we would be standing alone, clutching the moral low ground.

I ask my colleagues to think about these points, as well as the good points made by the ranking member, and to oppose this bill.

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