This was absolutely buried under the avalanche of insane Trump stories yesterday, but the few people who saw it were shocked. The Wall Street Journal says that a payment of $400 million was being secretly sent to Iran while Obama was touting that he was able to get Americans hostages released.
From the Wall Street Journal’s exposé:
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Of course, Obama is denying that it was a hostage payment:
Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.
“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”
But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Barack Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”
“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.
The fact that this payment was going to be made had been reported before and caused a lot of outrage, as shown below:
In settlement worked out at The Hague, US to return $400-million to Iran plus $1.3-billion in interest on 1970s arms sales trust fund.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 17, 2016
…but we didn’t know that it was being sent out secretly as a hostage payment.
This is yet another example of how Obama’s “soft power” idiocy weakens our reputation around the world while trying to preserve his personal reputation.