According to the Washington Free Beacon, Bessent disclosed that U.S. officials are tracking a surge of capital flight by regime insiders even as protests over the collapsing Iranian rial stretch into a third week and the death toll mounts. “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.
He added that “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," underscoring Washington’s intent to deny Tehran’s elite a safe financial haven.
The unrest began as a backlash to financial mismanagement and the free fall of the rial, but it has evolved into a broader anti-regime uprising that the theocratic government has met with extraordinary brutality. Iran’s crackdown has produced a staggering human cost, with estimates ranging “from at least 12,000 to as many as 20,000 deaths, according to CBS News,” as President Donald Trump weighs whether to intervene on behalf of the demonstrators.
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The administration moved Thursday to tighten the screws further, unveiling a new tranche of sanctions targeting Iranian officials involved in the repression of protesters, freezing any U.S.-linked assets and barring American firms from doing business with them. At the same time, the Pentagon has begun a precautionary drawdown of some personnel and equipment from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which Iran targeted with missiles last summer after U.S. strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, though those attacks caused minimal damage.
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Bessent argued that the regime’s current crisis is the direct result of President Trump’s hard-line strategy toward Tehran and its terror-sponsoring apparatus. “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, suggesting that as the clerical leadership scrambles to spirit its wealth abroad, Washington’s resolve may finally be forcing Iran’s rulers to confront the consequences of decades of corruption and aggression.
