Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin reassured lawmakers Tuesday that the department is preparing sanctions against corrupt Kremlin-linked people who are listed in a classified version of a report mandated by Congress.
But Democrats remain dissatisfied with the administration’s public handling of that action, as well as its implementation of the broader Russia-sanctions portion of a wide-ranging law passed in July, which is intended in part to crack down on Russia for 2016 election interference.
Under that legislation signed reluctantly by the president in August, the administration had to provide Congress with a report last Monday on Russian oligarchs and senior political figures. Experts and lawmakers slammed the resulting public document as a copy-and-paste version of Forbes’ 2017 richest Russians list.
Mnuchin said Wednesday that an “incredibly extensive” classified annex goes further than the public list, and will serve as the foundation for further sanctions.
“We detailed in the report where there was evidence of corruption, family relationships, net worth,” he told lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. “We did identify people that were involved in corruption, and we will be using that to come out with sanctions.”
He said the sanctions would be applied on a rolling basis in coming months.
But Maryland senator Ben Cardin, who served as ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time the list was released, said that he remains dissatisfied with the administration’s implementation of the sanctions law.
“The oligarchs list was a cut and paste job which was terrible,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “That was absolutely outrageous. It was counterproductive.”
“You have people on that list that you give the impression that they’re part of the oligarchs, and they’re not,” he continued. “You have people who fall below the dollar amount that are very much engaged in corruption with Mr. Putin that are not on the list.”
“I’m not giving them a pass,” he said. He added that a congressional review of the classified list was ongoing.
That dissatisfaction is resonating among House Democrats. Asked about Mnuchin’s sanctions promise, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee, Eliot Engel, said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I don’t believe they’re at all serious about sanctioning Russia or any of the oligarchs.”
Cardin and a group of 21 Democratic senators wrote to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in late January and condemned the administration for imposing “no new sanctions required under the mandatory provisions” of the law, known as the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
On the same day that the oligarch report was due, lawmakers were expecting the administration to announce whether it would be implementing sanctions related to Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors.
The State Department said it would not be imposing sanctions for now, seeing as the legislation was itself “serving as a deterrent:” the bill had forced foreign governments to abandon planned Russian defense acquisitions.
“The results of our engagement and our demarches globally, we have been able to turn off potential deals that equal several billion dollars,” a State Department official said at the time.
The date in question, January 29, the official said, “was not a deadline to impose sanctions.” “It was actually a start date. … It was the day on or after which we could start imposing sanctions.”
But in their late January letter the senators said the deterrent value of the bill “is only effective if potential targets believe that the threat of sanctions is genuine.” The sanctions, they said, are meant “to target the income streams of entities in the defense and intelligence sectors, given the sectors’ responsibility for the attack on our political process in 2016.”
Cardin said Tuesday that the classified information given to Congress related to the defense and intelligence sanctions decision was “helpful.” But he and the other senators also earlier urged the administration to “make as much information as possible public so that the American people understand the actions you are taking to implement the sanctions.”
