Republicans, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, condemned the transaction and have seized on it as a payment of ransom for prisoners that could put other Americans at risk.
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Obama described the flap over the cash payment as a diversion from the success of the nuclear accord between Iran and world powers. “What we’re doing is insane”. They said the agreement on the release of the prisoners dovetailed with the resolution of parallel negotiations over the dispute of the failed arms deal.
The only real news regarding his nuclear deal with Iran, he said, would be if opponents to the deal finally admitted they were wrong. “It doesn’t represent anything the American people weren’t told by the president and by the administration”. The president also clarified that the reason why the money was given in cash was because the United States is “so strict in maintaining sanctions” and because the country has “no banking relationship” with Iran.
Trump went on to speculate that the tape was “given to us” by the Iranians to “embarrass our country and embarrass our president”, apparently concluding that the footage had been released by Iranian intelligence or government security services. “By all accounts, it has worked exactly the way we said it was going to work”, he said.
In announcing the agreement, Obama said that paying the $400 million – plus $1.3 billion in interest – was saving American taxpayers billions of dollars. “They’re struggling to justify their opposition to our engagement with Iran”, he told a briefing. “We have stood up an entire section of interagency experts who devote all of their time to working with these families to get these Americans out, but those families know that we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom”, Obama said.
The payment is the settlement of a decades-old dispute over returning Iranian funds from a weapons purchase placed by the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi before he was ousted.
President Barack Obama says Islamic State militants will probably continue to be a threat to the US even after the group is ousted from key strongholds in Iraq and Syria.
Iran had been seeking more than $10 billion in arbitration. At the same time, the White House unfroze a larger pool of Iranian assets, estimated at $100 to $150 billion, as part of the nuclear deal, though administration officials cautioned that Iran would only pocket about $50 billion after legal claims.
As it was making the January cash delivery, the USA also imposed new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile testing.
“That sort of ransom payment as part of the Iran deal is an outrage”, said Republican Sen.
U.S. officials sent an unmarked cargo plane loaded with Euros, Swiss, Francs and other currencies, suggesting that the payment may have been related to the release of five Americans, which included Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and Christian Pastor Saeed Abedini. But the disagreement over the money dates back decades, and it appeared likely that a Hague commission that oversees competing claims between the USA and Iran would have ordered the return of the money, plus a larger amount of interest, had there been no settlement.
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Kerry reiterated that the formal implementation of the Iran nuclear deal, the cash transfer, and the hostage exchange were separate lines of effort-but that the timing of all three happened to coincide.
