US preparing to issue Syria sanction relief

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00:00Well, this is a road we were on, so we've been doing the work, the prep work for it.

00:05Their finance minister, we provided him a visa to travel to Washington, D.C. two weeks ago.

00:11Their foreign minister, we provided him a visa a week ago to travel to New York and met with our UN representative.

00:16I was scheduled to come here and meet today with the foreign minister.

00:20I was with the president when he made the decision to do this and included it in his speech.

00:24So we've been doing preparatory work in that regard.

00:26The core of these sanctions are statutory under the CESAR Act.

00:30I've had members of Congress and both parties ask us to use the waivers' authorities in that law,

00:37and that's what the president intends to do.

00:39Those waivers have to be renewed every 180 days.

00:43Ultimately, if we make enough progress, we'd like to see the law repealed

00:46because you're going to struggle to find people to invest in a country when in six months sanctions could come back.

00:54We're not there yet. That's premature.

00:55I think we want to start with the initial waiver, which will allow foreign partners who wanted to flow in aid

01:01to begin to do so without running the risk of sanctions.

01:04I think as we make progress, hopefully we'll be in a position soon or one day

01:07to go to Congress and ask them to permanently remove the sanctions.

01:11Hopefully now we'll have our own actions.

01:12We're on our own screens.

01:14Let's get started.

01:15Let's get started.

01:16Let's get started.