Sen. Ted Cruz is quite good at this. Yesterday he questioned Sec. of State Antony Blinken in what quickly became a pretty one-sided spectacle. Cruz grilled Blinken to the point that Blinken all but gave up on answering. And even then Cruz kept him over the fire until Blinken was done, well done you might say. It started with Cruz's opening statement:

Mr. Secretary, you have presided over the worst foreign policy disaster of modern times. When Joe Biden became president, he inherited peace and prosperity in the world. We now have two simultaneous wars waging: the worst war in Europe since World War II and the worst war in the Middle East in 50 years. Both, I believe, were caused by this administration's consistent weakness. And indeed, your foreign policy is precisely backwards from what a rational American foreign policy should be. To our friends and allies, this administration has consistently undermined, weakened, and attacked them. And to our enemies, this administration has shown constant appeasement and indeed has flowed billions of dollars to the enemies of America who want to kill us.”

He then asked about the State Department sending condolences to Iran and the UN flying its flags at half staff in response to the death of President Ebrahim Raisi. Blinken said he agreed the world was better off without Raisi but he drew the line at criticizing the UN saying, "I'll look at what they've done, we certainly would not do that."

From there, Sen. Cruz turned to a series of questions about this story published in the Washington Post on May 11.

The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance in an effort to persuade it to hold back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.

After reading that paragraph aloud, Sen. Cruz pressed Sec. Blinken on whether or not it was true. Blinken attempted to offer longer filibuster answers but Cruz cut him off. Eventually, Blinken denied all of the claims in the Post story. He said he and Biden administration did not know the location of any Hamas leaders or tunnels that they were withholding from Israel. Blinken even agreed that the sources who spoke to the post were "lying." 

I think this was something like a Clintonian answer on Blinken's part. If you read the Post story carefully, it's not clear that we have the information on Hamas leaders or tunnels. The story says we offered "sensitive intelligence" that could help Israel's military pinpoint them. In other words, we may not have coordinates but we have something that could potentially lead to coordinates. So when Blinken denied that we know where leaders or tunnels are he may not have been strictly lying. The point is we have the capability to pinpoint those things and that capability is what we offered Israel, not coordinates. At least that's how I'm reading it. It would be nice if the Post would return to the story in light of this exchange.

Eventually, Sen. Cruz moved on to Iran. Here he leveled his most damaging accusations, claiming that the Biden administration had effectively funded the 10/7 attacks by allowing Iran to evade US sanctions.

Cruz, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, grilled Blinken over the number of barrels of oil Iran is now selling per day, compared to when he first took office, as well as the number of Iran’s ghost fleet ships.

“This administration desperately wants a new Iran deal. You have been showering cash on Iran from day one, and understand, the $6 billion you were asked about is the tip of the iceberg,” Cruz said. “By refusing to enforce oil sanctions, we have seen Iran’s oil sales go from 300,000 barrels a day when you got into office to over two million barrels a day today.”...

“This administration, you and President Biden, funded the October 7 attacks by flowing $100 billion to a homicidal, genocidal regime that funded those attacks,” Cruz said.

I found some support for Sen. Cruz's numbers here. This is from April of this year.

Iran exported 141.7 million barrels of oil during the first quarter of 2024, a 28 percent increase over the same period last year. Increased oil exports enhance Tehran’s currency reserves and enable it to support its military industry and proxies as it escalates tension with Jerusalem.

In March 2024, Iranian exports reached 1.82 million barrels per day, the highest rate since October 2018, just before the Trump administration reinstated oil sanctions. Export growth substantially impacts Tehran’s budget since oil exports accounted for more than 40 percent of Iran’s total export revenue in 2023...

Since President Joe Biden assumed office, total Iranian oil exports have exceeded $100 billion, which is greater than the annual budget of Greece or Ireland. Had Tehran’s average daily export volume remained the same as it was while Donald Trump’s maximum pressure policy was in effect from May 2019 to January 2021, the regime would have had $40 billion less to spend on ballistic missiles and proxy groups.

The same basic outline Cruz offered can also be found in this story published last August:

TankerTrackers.com that monitors global oil shipments, reported that in the initial 20 days of August, Iran dispatched an average of over two million barrels of oil daily, marking a more than 30-percent surge compared to the past few months...

Iran’s oil exports began to decline in 2018 when former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear accord in May 2018 and imposed third-party sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and international banking. By 2019, Iran was barely shipping 250,000 barrels per day and according to some of its senior officials at the time, it was earning less than $10 billion a year.

Changes started in late 2020 when Joe Biden won the US presidential election. In September of that year, he declared in a CNN op-ed that he aimed to reverse Trump’s decision and resurrect the Iran nuclear deal. China immediately increased Iranian oil purchases, pushing exports to about 700,000 barrels per day by mid-2021. During this period, Tehran engaged in indirect negotiations with Washington concerning the JCPOA, which persisted for 18 months without yielding any results.

So it looks like Cruz has a point about the general improvement in the Iranian regime's finances being tied directly to the Biden administration's interest in reviving the Iran deal. Here's the full grilling.