Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) military personnel stand guard on an avenue in downtown Tehran during a rally commemorating the International Quds Day, also known as the Jerusalem day, on April 29, 2022.

A new report indicates that President Joe Biden has decided against removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list or offering any further concessions to Iran as part of ongoing negotiations, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. Iran’s last major demand in nuclear negotiations has reportedly been the lifting of the IRGC’s designation.

View from Congress: “It would be a terrible decision to do anything other than that. If that’s true… that’s good news to me,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) — generally a vocal critic of the administration’s Iran strategy — told JI. “Anything other than that would be wholly unacceptable.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who has expressed skepticism of the Biden administration’s approach to Iran, told JI that “the president made the right decision in keeping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terror blacklist,” adding in a tweet that the move was “a triumph of common sense.”

Wrench in the works: In another potential obstacle to the ongoing negotiations, a senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was shot in Tehran last week, in a move that some observers said was similar to previous attacks suspected to be orchestrated by Israel and may have been intended to disrupt the nuclear talks. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), one of the Iran deal’s most prominent supporters on the Hill, told JI, “This assassination obviously throws another significant wrench in the works,” lamenting that “it doesn’t appear there’s a lot of progress happening.”

Coming up: Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, a rare public briefing on the status of the talks. Following Malley’s testimony, the committee is set to hear from an expert panel including Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz and Carnegie Endowment for Peace Senior Fellow Karim Sadjadpour. Dubowitz, a vocal opponent of the JCPOA, said in an interview with JI that he plans to tell the committee that “the United States is going to pay a very high price for these nuclear restrictions that last less than a decade” under the deal — more than $1 trillion in sanctions relief by 2031, according to FDD calculations.

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Elsewhere: A Wall Street Journal report this morning found that Iranian intelligence accessed secret internal reports from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog and sent them to top officials in Tehran, who then prepared cover stories and falsified records to evade nuclear inspectors.

Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Haley Stevens (D-MI)

Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Andy Levin (D-MI) exchanged attacks over campaign funding and support from AIPAC and corporate PAC groups in their second primary debate on Tuesday night, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The two are set to square off in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District in August, after a redrawing of the state’s congressional map eliminated one of the state’s 14 seats in Congress.

Follow the money: Levin said during the debate that he had only taken a small amount of funding throughout his career from corporate PACs and “decided during this election to just do away with it altogether,” adding, “I’m also not funded by special- interest groups that are supporting insurrectionist Republicans.” He called on Stevens to do the same. JI found earlier this month that Levin had taken $55,000 from corporate PACs and industry groups that also backed Republicans who opposed election certification. A day after that revelation, Levin announced he would give away those funds and reject future corporate and industry group PAC donations.

PAC fight: Stevens said Levin had “been taking corporate PAC money his entire career,” noting that the Michigan congressman had made his decision to return the funds “just last week.” She later added that Levin only made the switch after “his hypocrisy was exposed.” Stevens noted that AIPAC has endorsed several members of Democratic leadership, as well as dozens of members of the House Progressive Caucus, and that she had also been endorsed by the Jewish Democratic Council of America and several other pro-Israel groups.

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Palestinian militants from the joint operations room of the Palestinian resistance factions attend the national conference on the first anniversary of the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza City on May 22, 2022.

In a move meant to target the finances of the terrorist group Hamas, the Treasury Department on Tuesday sanctioned several people and entities connected to a secretive Hamas investment network with $500 million in assets, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

Multinational operation: “Today’s action targets the individuals and companies that Hamas uses to conceal and launder funds,” Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, said. The sanctions, announced while Rosenberg was in Israel to discuss efforts to counter terrorist financing, target a senior Hamas official, three Hamas financial facilitators and six companies — operating in Sudan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates — that have generated revenue for Hamas through the group’s Investment Office.

Practical implications: The designation of the network by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control will have implications for “anybody who continues to do business with [or] provide financial services to any of these persons or companies,” noted Matthew Levitt, ​​a former FBI investigator and deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department who is now the Fromer-Wexler Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Higher bar: The sanctions come several months after the Biden administration pledged to constrain its use of sanctions following a 2021 review of financial and economic sanctions. “I think there is a higher bar now because I think there’s a recognition that we don’t want to overuse our sanctions authority,” said Michael Greenwald, who served as U.S. Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait from 2015 to 2017.

Alternate reality: The State Department pointed out the irony of Hamas growing its investment portfolio “while Palestinians in Gaza face harsh living and economic conditions,” department spokesperson Ned Price said in a press release.

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A planeload of Israeli executives who landed in Casablanca, Morocco, this week drew government ministers, corporate leaders and a senior royal adviser seeking their advice on developing a startup business culture, The Circuit’s Jonathan Ferziger reports. The Israelis, representing technology companies largely involved in agriculture, water conservation, health systems and sustainable energy, are spending three days at a conference in the North African kingdom, mixing with potential Moroccan investors and looking to make deals.

Israel as a model: “Our goal is to build a startup ecosystem,” Morocco’s minister for digital transformation, Ghita Mezzour, told The Circuit after addressing the conference’s opening session on Monday. “We’re looking at Israel’s expertise in how to build the components and how to make them interact.”

Tech ties: The conference, billed as the “Morocco-Israel Connect to Innovate Forum” was organized by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit group based in Tel Aviv that promotes Israeli business through what it describes as technology diplomacy. The group’s CEO, Avi Hasson, the Israeli government’s former chief scientist, said he hopes Morocco can serve as a beachhead for Israeli companies seeking to do business throughout Africa. “We believe that Morocco, under the leadership of His Majesty Mohammed VI, is uniquely suited to partner with Israel in blazing a trail to a new MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region, one that is connected by a genuine desire for peace and prosperity,” Hasson said.

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