Yesterday, and only hours after the ISIS attack on Tehran, the Senate voted to invoke cloture by a vote of 91-8 to allow a vote on S.722, the Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017. News reports suggest that further action on the bill, which is otherwise likely to pass the Senate, is being delayed for the moment based on a desire to tack onto the bill new Russia sanctions.

The pending legislation follows the pattern of recent Iran sanctions legislation. Rather than affirmatively imposing specific sanctions, the legislation would require the President to impose a variety of sanctions, including asset blocking, against companies and individuals, including foreign companies and individuals, who the President determines has assisted Iran in certain activities. Those activities are aiding Iran’s ballistic missile program, assisting Iran’s violations of human rights, and materially contributing to the transfer of arms to Iran.  Additionally, the President is directed to impose blocking and transactional sanctions on the “officials, agents, or affiliates” of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran has argued, not surprisingly, that the Senate Bill is inconsistent with the JCPOA, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. The strongest argument in this regard concerns the secondary sanctions imposed on non-U.S. companies involved in arms sales to Iran. Under section 1.8 of Annex II to the JPCPOA, the E.U. commits to lift its arms embargo on Iran. And under section 5.1.2 of Annex II, the United States commits to “license non-U.S. entities that are owned or controlled by a U.S. person to engage in activities with Iran that are consistent with this JCPOA.”
The proposed legislation would require the President to impose sanctions on foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies that engage in arms deals with Iran, which would appear to violate that commitment. Although nothing in the U.S. commitments forecloses it from imposing secondary sanctions on wholly-foreign companies that engage in arms trading with Iran, it would difficult to argue that the JPCPOA prevented secondary sanctions on foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies but not on wholly-foreign companies.

Of course, any violation here would be purely prospective. Under section 20.1 of Annex V, the arms embargo is not lifted until eight years after Implementation Day. Moreover, no violation would occur until the President actually designated a company under the proposed legislation, which may or may not ever happen. So although the proposed legislation might ultimately lead to a potential violation of the JCPOA, the simple adoption of the bill itself would not.

Last week I posted on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’s opinion setting aside the $4 million fine that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) imposed on Epsilon Electronics for shipping weapons of mass destruction (namely, subwoofers and other car audio pimping items)  to Iran.  As noted in the prior post, the D.C. Circuit came to the somewhat astonishing conclusion that you could violate the prohibition on exporting to Iran if there were red flags that your shipment might be diverted from the country of export to Iran even if that shipment ultimately did not wind up in Iran. Even so, the Court set aside the jaw-dropping fine and sent the case back to OFAC for further consideration.

Having found that OFAC did not need evidence of a shipment to Iran to fine someone for exporting to Iran, the Court then took the paradoxical position that OFAC erred by not considering evidence that five of the thirty-nine shipments involved might not have actually gone to Iran. The emails in question were ones that “contemplate[d] [Epsilon] products being sold out of the Asra store in Dubai.” The Court explains this apparent inconsistency by saying that these emails tended to show that Epsilon “did not have reason to know those shipments were specifically intended for reexport to Iran.” Remember, the Court has taken the position that, in the Court’s version of “ordinary English usage,”  you are “exporting” something to someone if you have reason to know it might go to that party even if it never does.

Leaving aside this metaphysical and linguistic conundrum about un-exported exports, the Court’s discussion of OFAC’s treatment of the ignored evidence is instructive.

Government counsel explained at oral argument that OFAC did not consider the emails credible evidence. We can infer as much from the agency’s liability finding. But we lack an explanation, from the record, of why they are not credible, and why they do not counsel against liability for the final five shipments.

The only discussion of the credibility of these emails in the record was an internal OFAC memorandum not provided to Epsilon, but the Court dismissed its reasoning. That memo argued that the Asra store opened after all but two of the five shipments in issue had been sent, but the Court noted that this would not rebut an inference that the earlier shipments were meant for sale at the store when it opened. Even more significantly, the Court noted:

We also note the low value of the last five shipments, two of which were worth just over one hundred dollars apiece. At the
time those shipments were sent, Epsilon knew its dealings with Asra were under OFAC investigation. OFAC did not explain why Epsilon would knowingly risk fines of up to $250,000 per shipment in return for such a small reward.

This is, of course, an excellent point and it could go much further than the case at hand. It is, indeed, a legitimate question that can be raised almost any time OFAC or the DOJ go after low-value exports.  Of the many things in the opinion for OFAC to dislike, I bet this part of the opinion is at the top of their list.

We have followed the saga of Epsilon Electronics extensively, beginning with the posts titled The Auto Sound and the OFAC Fury Part I and Part II followed by Epsilon, Epsilon and, then, As Epsilon Lay Dying, which discussed the federal district court’s decision reviewing OFAC’s $4.073 million fine imposed on Epsilon. Epsilon has persevered, and now the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has spoken in an opinion setting aside the fine and remanding the case back to OFAC for further proceedings.

I am going to break my thoughts on the D.C. Circuit’s opinion into several posts. This post will deal with an issue that Epsilon lost, namely its argument that it couldn’t be fined under section 560.204 of the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (“ITSR”) without a showing that its products wound up in Iran. At issue were shipments Epsilon made to a distributor in Dubai that OFAC said only or mostly dealt with Iran. OFAC’s argument was that 560.204 was violated when Epsilon shipped the goods to Dubai when it knew, or should have known, that the goods would then be exported to Iran. According to OFAC, the shipment to Dubai was the violation of the ITSR whether or not the goods ultimately made it to Iran. (Significantly, OFAC did not charge Epsilon with attempt under section 560.203, where it would clearly not require a showing that the goods wound up in Iran.)

Section 560.204 prohibits exports to Iran “including the exportation … to … a third country undertaken with … reason to know that such goods … are intended specifically for … re-exportation, directly or indirectly, to Iran.” Using a somewhat bizarre analogy the Court reasoned that a shipment to Dubai with reason to know the goods were going to Iran was an “export to Iran” even if the goods never got to Iran.

Suppose you put a birthday card in the mail, addressed to your brother. While the card is still en route, your mother asks you, “Did you send a card to your brother?” In line with OFAC’s usage, you would respond, “I sent a card to him, but it hasn’t arrived yet,” because you put the card in transit, intending it to reach him. Following Epsilon’s usage, though, you would have to say, “I didn’t send a card to him,” because the card has not yet arrived.

This strange analogy fails because here the card is not put in the mail addressed to the brother. Instead, it was put in an envelope addressed to a third party with a note saying that if the third party saw the brother he should give this card to him. When Mom asked about the birthday card, only the most reprobate of siblings would respond that he sent the card to his brother. “No, Mom, but I did send it to Joe Schmo with a request that he give it to Bill if he sees him.”

The dissenting opinion by Judge Silberman notes that the majority opinion’s notion that a shipment to Dubai with reason to know it was going to Iran was an “export to Iran” is a notion that is inconsistent with OFAC’s decisions below. Judge Silberman points to a statement made by OFAC in the penalty proceeding that “multiple facts tend to show that the goods exported to Asra were sent to Iran,” which, “fudged the answer to the crucial question” whether a violation occurred without regard to whether goods ever wound up in Iran.

In my view there is another reason that section 560.204 can’t be read in the fashion suggested by the majority opinion. The statutory basis for the regulation is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act which, in section 1702, provides the power to the President to bar exports to a foreign country after declaring an emergency with respect to that country.  A declaration of national emergency has, in fact, been issued with respect to Iran. But, section 1701(b) of IEEPA provides:

The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.

Here Epsilon shipped product to Dubai. Its alleged “reason to know” that the goods might go to Iran was that the distributor had business in Iran. Even if the distributor was contractually obligated to sell the goods only in Dubai and that’s the only place they were sold, OFAC’s reasoning would be that this “reason to know” was enough for there to be a violation. That, I think, does not deal with an emergency declared with respect to Iran. This would not even qualify as an attempted export to Iran, which I think is the farthest limit that IEEPA permits sanctioning an activity without an actual export to Iran.