After four decades, an Iranian official has admitted that the theocratic Iranian regime aided murderous attacks in which hundreds of Americans were killed.

In April 1983, the terrorist group Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, murdering 63 people, including 17 Americans. Months later, two suicide truck bombers blew up a barracks in Lebanon, murdering 220 U.S. Marines, 18 U.S. Navy sailors, and 3 U.S. Army soldiers. That attack was the deadliest single-day death toll for the U.S. Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

In 2001, families of the Americans who were killed or wounded in the attacks filed suit against Iran; Iran always denied it had taken part in the attacks.

But now, Iran’s representative to Lebanon admitted he aided the effort to target American military members. As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai stated:

I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were. … The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon’s] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution’s victory. …

With the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Hezbollah was established. For two years, [Hezbollah’s] military base was located in my home. ‘The group’ [supporters of the Islamic Revolution] signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs. Perhaps more than 70 signed this contract in my home.

“The state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quickly scrubbed the damning disclosure that Tabatabai made about Iran’s role in the suicide bombings of Americans, but MEMRI preserved a copy,” Fox News reported.

Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute told Fox News Digital, “Americans have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account. Now that the supreme leader’s representative has confessed, the questions are: (1) Will Americans who carried water for Iranian terrorism apologize? (2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror? If [President] Biden prices five Americans at $6 billion, the U.S. should demand no less than $289.2 billion from Iran today.”

Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert, said, “Given the Biden [and French President Emmanuel Macron] administrations’ desperation for any facsimile of a deal with the Khomeinist regime, they will likely sweep this under the rug.”

“The complicity of Iran in the 1983 attack was established conclusively at trial by the testimony of Admiral James A. Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations from 1983-85,” a memo from Peterson v. Islamic Republic Of Iran noted.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland denied any wrongdoing in how he runs the Department of Justice after facing widespread accusations of political bias.

Garland made the remarks during an interview that aired Sunday night on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” with co-host Scott Pelley.

“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats,” Garland said. “We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends. We don’t have one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, for the rich or for the poor, based on ethnicity. We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”

Garland said that he could not speak about the two federal criminal cases against former President Donald Trump because it was an ongoing case and that Department’s policy is that he cannot comment about it.

“One reason is to protect the privacy and the civil liberties of the person who’s under investigation,” Garland said in explaining why the rule exists for all investigations. “It’s to protect witnesses who also may or may not become public later in an investigation. And then finally, it’s to protect the investigation itself. Investigations proceed in many different directions, eventually coming to a fruition, a decision to charge or not charge about a particular thing or not. And if witnesses and potential subjects knew everything that the investigators had previously looked at and were about to look at, it could well change testimony. It could well make witnesses unavailable to us.”

Garland addressed critics who say that he timed the prosecutions to hurt Trump in the 2024 election.

“Well, that’s absolutely not true,” he said. “Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations.”

Garland said that he is not in communication with President Joe Biden or anyone else in the administration in regards to the cases against Trump.

Pelley then asked Garland what he would do if Biden asked him to take action in the cases involving Trump.

“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” he said. “And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen.”

The segment noted that Biden himself is also under criminal investigation by a special counsel over his own handling of classified materials.

Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was recently indicted on federal gun charges in a separate special counsel investigation and remains under investigation over other business matters.

Garland said that he will make the results of the special counsel’s report public “to the extent permissible under the law, that is required to explain their prosecutive decisions, their decisions to prosecute or not prosecute and their strategic decisions along the way.”

“Usually, the special counsels have testified at the end of their reports, and I expect that that will be the case here,” he added.