I exceeded my daily What-The-Fck-Is-Going-On-Here? weekly quota on Wednesday some time between Sharpiegate and Steve King's announcement that he drank out of a toilet. (King '20: Almost As Smart As Your Cat.) Nevertheless, reading this incredible Financial Times story, I feel I have to beg The Great Whoever to borrow against next week's allotment.

It seems that the Department of State is now following the negotiating strategies that have been so successful down through the decades for the Gambino family.

Four days before the US imposed sanctions on an Iranian tanker suspected of shipping oil to Syria, the vessel’s Indian captain received an unusual email from the top Iran official at the Department of State. “This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike Pompeo and serve as the US Representative for Iran,” Mr Hook wrote to Akhilesh Kumar on August 26, according to several emails seen by the Financial Times. “I am writing with good news.” The “good news” was that the Trump administration was offering Mr Kumar several million dollars to pilot the ship — until recently known as the Grace 1 — to a country that would impound the vessel on behalf of the US. To make sure Mr Kumar did not mistake the email for a scam, it included an official state department phone number.

Great. So now a tanker captain has a direct number into the State Department. I expect, any day now, Mike Pompeo will be tearing the commissary apart trying to see if he has Prince Albert in a can.

The offer to Mr Kumar marks a new front in the US “maximum pressure” campaign designed to starve Iran of cash and persuade Tehran to come to the table to negotiate a broader deal than the nuclear accord that Iran signed with the Obama administration and world powers in 2015. In response to the FT story, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted: “Having failed at piracy, the US resorts to outright blackmail — deliver us Iran’s oil and receive several million dollars or be sanctioned yourself.”

The vessel was seized by British commandos off Gibraltar in July on suspicions that it was carrying Iranian oil to Syria in breach of EU sanctions. After Iran said the oil would not go to Syria, a court in the British territory ordered its release last month despite a last-minute US legal bid to seize the vessel... “With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age,” Mr Hook wrote in a second email to Mr Kumar that also included a warning. “If you choose not to take this easy path, life will be much harder for you.”

And leave the cannoli.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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