It's harsh, but the big boys play that way. I once met a "retired" US attorney who was very wealthy due to handling those sorts of cases which run some sort of commission basis. It's the gravy train reward for slick lawyers the government really likes.
It's a few levels above the affirmative action IRS court jobs they give to ex welfare mothers who finish their degrees and then make life miserable for successful people who did not pay enough taxes from the viewpoint of the entitled.
On that banking thing though, they have the point of saying they won't provide service to certain countries, and anybody else in the business of exchanging privelaged access for profit knows how that works. When you are talking about the transfer fees for billion dollar deals, you are also talking about someone gaining access to control segments of the US economy due to measurable wealth here. For example, eventually controlling housing costs through loan financing. Or cars, or jobs for that matter, functionally implementing Sharia economic law.
I have seen that in the car business too. These Iranians show up on dealership row with a few million of up front money to open a car dealership, then another few million in backing from some finance company nobody heard of before. That gets them embedded into the local economy on a traditionally profitable business where their people end up in co troll of a lot of stuff and it is defacto sharia economic law. Not saying they are all Khomeni loyalists, but from the outside, you really have no way of knowing. Before you know it, the local finance companies vie to compete with them by either dropping rates, opening up car loan eligibility or shunning high risk loans, depending on the plays being made since they would happily let the Iranians and foreign lenders take the hit on high risk loans, or they play them to get treated right in order to facilitate a bigger take later on.
That's goes quick and rough in the house flipping trades, especially during the buildup years prior to the establishment of ISIS and those executive orders you heard about Bush signing to prevent people from leaving the US with large amounts of cash. What these Jihadis were doing was flipping houses, but hustled it so they could pull cash out of the properties and head to Syria with the money. It was allowed until the Feds figured out that was funding forces hostile to Americans. In fact when that was going on is when you saw those meetings like with McCain glad handing he jihadis over there.
More to it that I can go into later, but there are reasons for excluding hostile nations from trading in the US dollar, and a lot of it has the very same reasons why there is economic warfare within a police state against any population deemed as an enemy, but then you get into the complexities of national politics vs internal social economic policy.
