Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that senior Iranian officials are funneling their money out of the country like “rats fleeing the ship,” amid escalating protests and financial unrest inside the Islamic Republic.
“We are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship. Because we can see tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country—snuck out of the country—by the Iranian leadership. So they are abandoning ship,” Bessent said Wednesday on Newsmax.
“And we are seeing it come into banks and financial institutions all over the world. And what we do at Treasury is we follow the money, whether it is through the typical banking system or through digital assets. We are going to trace these assets, and they will not be able to keep them,” he continued.
The revelations come amid increasing state-sponsored violence and chaos inside the Islamic Republic, as President Donald Trump weighs American intervention. Anti-regime protests that started because of financial uncertainty after the collapse of the Iranian rial are entering their third week. Iran’s response to the protests has been historically violent, with estimates ranging from at least 12,000 to as many as 20,000 deaths, according to CBS News. Trump has repeatedly warned of U.S. intervention if the regime were to kill protesters.
The United States on Thursday imposed a new round of sanctions against Iranian officials implicated in the persecution of protesters, preventing them from holding any assets tied to the United States and blocking U.S. companies from doing business with them.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon began evacuating some personnel and equipment from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as a precautionary move while President Trump weighs American intervention. The air base was targeted by Iranian missiles last summer after U.S. strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, though the strikes caused little damage.
Bessent credited Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign for Iran’s political and financial instability. “We’re quickly approaching the endgame of President Trump’s plan that he put into effect almost immediately when he came into office. We’ve been applying a maximum pressure campaign on Iran’s oil exports to cut off the sources of the regime’s funding. And what we have seen in the past month is a total financial collapse of the regime,” Bessent said.
