Republican Sen. John Kennedy (La.) dug into President Biden’s foreign policy on Iran on Tuesday, claiming he would “take away” the president’s car keys if he were his son.
“When I look at President Biden in terms of his international affairs, national security and his domestic policy over the last two years and change — if it were my father, I’d take away his car keys, much less … the entire country, and I think … that’s what most Americans are thinking right now,” Kennedy said in an interview on Fox Business’s “The Bottom Line.”
“And I think that’s why President Biden polls right up there with Bud Light at the moment,” Kennedy continued in reference to Bud Light’s drop in sales following its controversial partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney this spring.
Kennedy was discussing the Biden administration’s sanctions on Iran, which some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have argued need to be more aggressive in the wake of militant group Hamas’s assault on Israel earlier this month; Hamas’s initial Oct. 7 attack left more than 1,400 people in Israel dead and prompted ongoing violence in both Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Iran has been a longtime backer of Hamas, supplying it with money, military training and weapons. Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.
“President Trump put tough, tough sanctions on Iran, so it couldn’t export its oil,” Kennedy said. “Those sanctions are still there, but President Biden hasn’t enforced them. So now, instead of … producing and exporting 500,000 barrels a day, Iran is exporting 1.4 million a day, and its foreign reserves have doubled. We had Iran down, and we were choking them economically.”
“President Biden, because he thought if he was a nice guy, Iran would cooperate in terms of its nuclear weapons — he let them up, and on top of that, he gave them … tried to give them $6 billion cash,” Kennedy continued, in reference to Biden’s prisoner swap with Iran last month that allowed for the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.
The U.S. and Israel have said they do not have any direct evidence that Iran played a role in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and Iran denies having played one. As the fighting has continued in the weeks since, however, Tehran has signaled it is increasingly willing to damage U.S. allies.
U.S. officials have maintained that the $6 billion has remained unspent and was reserved for humanitarian use, though some lawmakers argued the funds may have freed up resources for Iran’s military spending and support of Hamas.
Fighting has raged on for more than three weeks since Hamas’s massacre, with Israel vowing to destroy the militant group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007. More than 8,500 people have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and more than 21,000 others have been wounded, the Hamas-operated health ministry in Gaza reported in a Tuesday updated.
Israel warned more than 1 million Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to move south in recent weeks, ahead of a wider ground incursion into the territory, but several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in the north.
Israeli forces stepped up their military incursion into northern Gaza over the weekend, attacking Hamas militants and infrastructure north of Gaza City. On Tuesday, Israeli forces launched a series of airstrikes in the densely packed Jabalia refugee camp that killed dozens of Palestinians, Reuters reported, citing Gaza officials.