Story highlights Hagar Chemali: If sanctions against a world power and its entities are a big deal, so, too, are top advisers to the then-President-elect taking secret meetings with representatives of those entities

Congress and the FBI need to get to the bottom of Jared Kushner's interactions with a sanctioned Russian bank, she writes

Hagar Hajjar Chemali is former Treasury spokeswoman for terrorism and financial Intelligence and former spokeswoman for the US Mission to the United Nations. She is founder and CEO of Greenwich Media Strategies LLC. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) March 17, 2014, the day the US government first imposed sanctions against Russia for its destabilizing activity in Ukraine, was a snow day. President Barack Obama had issued a new executive order (E.O. 13661) as part of a wider policy response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Roads were empty as I drove to the office, and I remember thinking -- people are barely waking up, and they don't realize that we're about to levy sanctions against a world power. That was a big deal then, and it's a big deal now.

Hagar Chemali

The White House and the US Department of the Treasury, where I was spokeswoman for terrorism and financial intelligence at the time, would go on to work closely with the European Union to continue the sanctions and to make sure they were very carefully and intricately designed to hit Russia where we thought it would make a difference (with minimal backfire on US and European business interests).

Our goal was to coerce the Russian government to cease its destabilizing behavior in the region and later to support the cease-fire and peace process

As part of that effort, in July 2014, the US Treasury enacted measures against Russian state-owned bank Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB bank. This bank is not only owned by the Russian government, but its board and members are close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in fact has the authority to appoint the bank's president.

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