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On 20 December 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13818, Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption. That executive order declared a national emergency with respect to serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world and provided for the imposition of sanctions on actors engaged in these malign activities. The order also authorized the U.S. Treasury to freeze the assets of persons who commit serious human rights abuse or engage in corruption: Specifically, it mandated that all property and interests in property that are in the United States belonging to persons identified in the order are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in. The order listed thirteen individuals (all of them foreign nationals) and also allowed for the U.S. Treasury to freeze the assets of any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury ... to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse as well as the assets of current or former government official[s] who have engaged in corruption. Shortly after the issuance of EO 13818, the web site Your News Wire published an article about it under the inaccurate and grossly misleading clickbait headline Trump Signs Executive Order To Seize Assets Of Clinton & Obama, with an opening sentence declaring that President Donald Trump has signed an executive order allowing federal agents to seize the assets of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nothing in EO 13818 specifically authorized the U.S. government to seize any assets belonging to former Presidents Obama or Clinton, nor did the text of the Your News Wire article provide any information supporting the premise of its false headline and lede. Executive Order 13818 is directed at thirteen foreign nationals identified in its Annex, as well as other foreign persons, two groups that do not include the Obamas or the Clintons. The order does more generally allow the U.S. Treasury to freeze the assets of any person who has materially assisted ... foreign person[s] in the conduction of human rights abuse[s] or government corruption. In an extremely vague and broad sense, those provisions could conceivably apply to the Clintons or Obamas ... or anyone else in the world. Nonetheless, the order doesn't mention any Obama or Clinton by name, it doesn't specifically target them (it's primarily aimed at foreign nationals and entities), and nothing in the Trump administration's announcement of the order suggested it could or would be applied to them: Of course, the gross and egregious misreporting about the nature of Executive Order 13818 was to be expected, as it originated with Your News Wire, a fake news site that peddles in sensationalized and fabricated clickbait stories.
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