Palestinian Authority Designed New Hamas-Backed Gov’t Around ‘Loopholes’ to Keep U.S. Foreign Aid Co

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Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department told TheBlaze, “You didn’t see the administration scrambling to determine whether it met legality [for continuing U.S. aid] or not.”

“The assumption going in was that it met threshold. Based on that, one has to assume there was a certain amount of forethought that went into the decision,” Schanzer said. He called the new government’s parameters a “picture-perfect interpretation” of U.S. law to allow the Palestinian Authority to continue receiving American foreign aid.

“All of this was done a little too neatly,” Schanzer said.

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“This is a John Grisham ending. It was a technically correct interpretation of the law and Abbas gets to keep the money at the end,” Schanzer said. “It’s unlikely this was done without some [U.S.] assistance.”

“This all came together very nicely for Abbas and for the Palestinian Authority and for Hamas … It raises a lot of questions as to how and if this was coordinated,” said Schanzer, who recently authored a book detailing

Palestinian Authority corruption titled, “State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State.”

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“It would appear that the U.S. has not thought this through. Or perhaps it has,” Schanzer said.

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