President Obama is flouting the “clear” will of a recently-passed visa waiver program law in order to satisfy Iranian business interests, according to a House Democrat who helped negotiate the legislation.
“I think it’s clear that Congress spoke in as clear a fashion as it could when this language was put into the omnibus,” Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Wednesday.
Thompson made the remarks during a hearing about how the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department plan to implement, or not implement, a law that prohibits people who have recently traveled to a country that sponsors terrorism from entering the United States without a visa under the visa waiver program. After Iranian officials complained that would violate the terms of Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran, the administration announced an exemption from the law that could allow business travelers to Iran enter the United States without a visa.
“One category specifically identified was individuals who traveled to Iran for legitimate business purposes after July 14, 2015, the same date the Iran deal was completed,” the Mississippi Democrat noted. “It will fall to the witnesses today to explain why we should not think that there is a linkage to the Iran deal when it announces this category in a press release distributed across the globe.”
Thompson also faulted the State Department for revealing the categories of people who might expect to receive an exemption from the travel restrictions, which might make it easier for potential terrorists to game the system. “We need to understand, particularly at a time when we know that there are some crafty would-be terrorists, eager to find new ways to work around security enhancements in the visa waiver program, why the administration has been so public about how the DHS secretary may exercise its discretion,” Thompson said.
A State Department official maintained that Obama’s team would not issue blanket exemptions from the travel restrictions and argued that it was important, in general, to facilitate travel from Europe to Iran and other terrorist hotbeds. She argued that the exemptions would enhance U.S. national security by making it easier to monitor the Iranian nuclear program.
“As a general matter, the United States has a strong national security interest in supporting the work of the United Nations and other international organizations, like the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Hillary Batjer Johnson, deputy coordinator for the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism, said in her prepared statement. “We would likely lose influence with these organizations were we to tell them and the world that we see their employees as security risks solely because of the official work they do in some of the world’s toughest places.”
That didn’t persuade the lawmakers, chiefly because the Obama administration had made that argument during the omnibus negotiations and lost. The bill was written after negotiations between Congress and the White House, which members of Congress say resulted in an agreement not to allow these kinds of exemptions.
House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, emphasized that point by producing emails that showed White House emails asking for such exemptions during the, only to have the request denied.
“I was in the meeting with the majority leader of the House and the other three national security committee chairman and we discussed your proposal … and that proposal was rejected on all counts,” McCaul said.
