In December 2024, the Biden Treasury Department sanctioned Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and whose party has governed Georgia since 2012. He holds no public office. He was the prime minister for one year, more than a decade ago. He hasn’t needed an office since.
I wrote in these pages last month that Washington sanctioned him and then made sure the checks still cleared. What has happened since is worse, and it is going to land on people who had nothing to do with any of it.
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On Aug. 7, the Trump Treasury Department sanctioned a company registered in Georgia for moving money on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Through the Georgian entity, an Iranian-born owner ran a cryptocurrency exchange that Treasury says took in more than $1 million in digital assets from Guard wallets and sent more than $2 million back. Georgia’s own national bank answered two days later that the firm had never applied for the authorization it needed and was therefore not something the bank regulated.
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In other words, it had been operating outside the system entirely.
A week later, the European Union published the list of countries aligning with the three decisions on Iran it adopted in July — on Tehran’s nuclear and missile program, on its military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and for armed groups in the Middle East, and on human rights abuses at home.
Nine aligned: every EU candidate in the Balkans, plus Moldova and Ukraine.
Georgia, an EU candidate itself, did not. Turkey and Serbia also stayed out, which tells you which room Tbilisi has chosen to stand in.
A ruling-party lawmaker, Tengiz Sharmanashvili, explained that Georgia backs such measures only when they serve Georgian interests, and that if a measure runs against them, Georgia is “not interested at all in whose interests it serves.”
This was not a first. The European Commission’s own Georgia report, published in November 2025, records that Tbilisi declined to align with the vast majority of EU restrictive measures against Russia, Belarus, and Iran. Its alignment with EU foreign policy had already fallen to 40%, from 53% the year before.
On Aug. 22, Iran’s Tehran Times ran Georgia’s refusal as a victory for sovereignty over Western pressure. The paper did not merely report it. It celebrated it.
Two days later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Operation Economic Outcast: five new categories of conduct exposed to American secondary sanctions — shipping, aviation, gold, technology, and digital assets — and a warning that countries tying themselves to Iran “should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime.”
He named no country but Iran. He did not have to.
One of the five categories is digital assets. And that connection is not mine to draw. In the Aug. 24 announcement, in which the Treasury sets out Iran’s attempts to exploit digital assets, the citation attached to those words is the Georgian case from 17 days earlier. Iran, the department writes in the same sentence, is leveraging third-country jurisdictions as critical enablers.
Georgia is one of them.
Congress already knows and wrote it down twice
Here is where it becomes a Washington problem rather than a Tbilisi one.
On June 8, the House passed House Resolution 7668, the Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act, requiring a classified intelligence report within 180 days of enactment on foreign penetration of Georgia. Its own title reads: “To require a report on Russian and Chinese intelligence assets in Georgia.”
The same sponsor’s other Georgia bill, the MEGOBARI Act, which passed the House 349-42, is titled an act “to counter the influence in Georgia of the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian Regime, and the Russian Federation.”
Same author. Same country. Two titles. One names Iran. The other does not.
And on the House floor on June 8, the day H.R. 7668 passed, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) said the Georgian Dream regime was selling the country out to Beijing, to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to Iran.
So the intelligence tasking Congress wrote for Georgia leaves out the power its own legislation names, its own sponsor names, and its own Treasury Department is now designating companies over. The bill sits in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Adding Iran is a drafting change of one line.
What the report would find if it were allowed to look
Al Mustafa International University of Qom, designated by the Treasury in 2020 as a recruitment platform for the Guard’s Quds Force, operates in Tbilisi, Marneuli, and Gardabani without accreditation as a Georgian higher-education institution.
More than 12,800 Iranian companies are registered in Georgia, according to the Economic Policy Research Center in Tbilisi — a 510% increase since 2012, the year Ivanishvili’s party took power. Some 700 reportedly share a single Tbilisi address.
In March, a crowd gathered outside the Iranian Embassy in Tbilisi and pledged to carry out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s orders.
On July 3, Georgian President Mikheil Kavelashvili flew to Tehran for Khamenei’s funeral and thanked Iran for supporting Georgian sovereignty, in a country a fifth of which Russia occupies. The crowds there chanted, “Death to America.”
And when the Hudson Institute documented all of this in March, Georgia’s State Security Service opened a criminal case for assisting a foreign power in hostile activity — against Giorgi Kandelaki, one of the report’s own authors, and former Defense Minister Tina Khidasheli. Kakha Kaladze, the mayor of Tbilisi and secretary general of Georgian Dream, called them traitors. Five months later, I can find no public record of an arrest, a charge, or a finding.
The network was not investigated. The people who described it were.
I served across Georgia’s state security, defense, and interior ministries from 1996 to 2008, working against Russian and Iranian operations. I know what a real counterintelligence investigation looks like, and I know what a message looks like.
Who actually pays
None of this means Georgians have chosen Iran.
Georgian soldiers served and died alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Georgians have protested their own government almost daily for nearly two years. They remain among the most pro-American publics in Europe. That is exactly why Tehran needs seminaries, companies, and clerics: It cannot win the country, so it buys the parts that stay put when governments change.
And when the secondary sanctions land, they will not land on Ivanishvili.
They will land on the port at Poti, the freight company in Batumi, the bank in Tbilisi, and some Georgian whose name nobody in Washington has ever heard — the same Georgians who have been standing in the street for two years asking America to notice them.
Washington spent two decades and a fortune building a partner on the Black Sea. It has now built a sanctions framework that could fall on the pieces of that partnership Tehran got to first.
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The Senate can still add one word to a bill.
Because the bill that matters is already being written, and it will not be addressed to Ivanishvili.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Parliament of Georgia (2008-2012) and a former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian operations. He is a geopolitical analyst in San Francisco.
