A document called General License No. 135 came out of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on October 9. One page. Dry regulatory language, the kind of document that doesn’t announce itself. But here is what it authorized, at bottom: American companies may now import Russian diesel fuel, in direct conflict with the 2022 law that banned such imports.
Four days later, twelve senators wrote to the president to call it a betrayal. Murkowski, Collins, McConnell, and Cornyn signed the letter. They argued the administration hadn’t consulted Congress. They argued it violated the statute. These aren’t backbenchers. They were genuinely angry.
Then, on October 16, Trump went further. He signed an executive order invoking the national-interest waiver in the Graham Act, the Russia sanctions package Congress had passed over the summer and Trump had signed in September. The senators who wrote that angry letter had, just ten weeks before, voted for the law whose escape hatch he just used.
I’ve been covering American politics for forty years. I still find this kind of thing genuinely remarkable, not because it’s new, but because it keeps surprising the people who should know better.
Here’s what happened. This past summer, Congress passed the Graham Act, a Russia sanctions package that had been years in the making. It passed the Senate 86 to 11. It was signed with ceremony. Senators made speeches about standing firm and honoring commitments. The kind of speeches that sound true in September and get tested in October.
The law included a waiver provision. These laws almost always do. Presidents of both parties have insisted on them. The language is standard: the president may waive any provision if he determines that doing so is in the national interest. That sentence has been in many major Russia sanctions bills. It was in this one too.
On October 9, with gas prices near $4.33 a gallon and midterm elections less than a month away, Treasury issued General License No. 135. By Monday, Trump was defending the diesel deal on social media. “I made the right choice for the American People.” The senators’ letter arrived the next day. On October 16, Trump signed the executive order invoking the Graham Act waiver.
This is what I want to sit with.
There is a version of this story that is a Russia story. The president’s comfort with Russian imports is real and it matters. But follow the thread all the way back and you don’t end up in Moscow. You end up in a Senate conference room, sometime in the spring, when the lawyers were writing the waiver clause into the Graham Act. Someone in that room wanted the flexibility. Someone argued you can’t tie the president’s hands completely. Someone said: put in a national interest waiver and we’ll be fine.
They were fine. Until October.
Here’s where it gets more complicated. Analysts who have examined the legal structure argue that General License No. 135 may not actually deliver cheaper diesel at the pump. The sanctions architecture around Russian energy is layered, and an OFAC authorization doesn’t automatically translate into lower prices at the gas station. One estimate puts the first potential shipments at less than a day of U.S. demand. The deal may be legally contested and practically irrelevant. Everyone involved might be arguing over something that won’t change much.
If that’s true, then what are we watching?
We’re watching an administration invoke a law to claim credit for fighting gas prices before an election. We’re watching a Senate argue that the invocation is a betrayal. Both sides are competing for the appearance of having a serious Russia policy, when what they’re both actually managing is a midterm election.
The senators aren’t wrong that this matters. Sanctions policy toward Russia has real consequences. But they also wrote a waiver clause into their own new law. They passed it ten weeks before Trump used it. Then they expressed surprise when he did. That’s not a failure specific to this administration. It’s a failure of how Congress writes laws when it wants to appear tough but isn’t prepared to actually constrain executive power.
I’ve seen this cycle run more times than I’d like to count. Congress passes a bill. The bill has teeth and an escape hatch. An administration uses the escape hatch. Congress objects. Nobody in the argument is lying. Nobody is entirely right.
What I keep wanting to ask, and what I never get a straight answer to, is this: if you write a waiver into a law, and you know it will be used, and you write it in anyway, what is the law actually for?
That’s not a Russia question. It’s a legislative one. And the answer, I suspect, tells you more about how Washington actually works than anything that happened in that Treasury building on October 9.
