Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence blasted the Obama administration on Thursday over a $400 million payment to Iran, which occurred around the time four American prisoners were released, calling it “ransom” that “essentially put a price tag on every American traveling overseas”.
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The Obama administration agreed to pay Iran $1.7 billion, including $400 million in cash.
The State Department confirmed it had received the request and would respond “as appropriate”. “But we don’t know what we don’t know, and so it’s conceivable that there are some networks here that could be activated”.
Iran released the five detainees on January 16 after the United States had agreed to grant clemency to seven Iranians held mostly for sanctions violations and drop charges against 14 Iranians overseas.
The cash transfer came after the Obama administration struck a deal with Iran to limit its capacity to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief for the country.
The U.S. and Iran have been negotiating the Iranian claim to the money since 1981, and Kerry said that negotiation was separate from the nuclear deal and talks about Americans held in Iran. USA officials did not disclose exactly when the plane landed in the Iranian capital of Tehran, but Iran’s Tasnim News Agency confirmed the aircraft arrived the same day the Americans left Iran. “There was no benefit to the United States of America to drag this out”.
He said Republicans, who have long opposed the Iran nuclear deal, are seizing on the payment as a way to undermine the deal.
The State Department announced the payment on January 17. But Hope Hicks confirms to the Washington Post the tape Trump saw was actually a public one of the USA hostages being released in Geneva.
“The reason that we had to give cash is precisely because we are so strict in maintaining sanctions and we do not have a banking relationship with Iran”, he added, going on to praise the nuclear deal and saying it had worked “exactly as intended”. He said his advice to Trump, a candidate he has declared “unfit” for the presidency, was to “go out there and try to win the election”. “It would also mark another chapter in the ongoing saga of misleading the American people to sell this risky deal”.
4 that the $400 million cash payment to Iran, which coincided with the release of four Americans held prisoner in Tehran, was not a ransom.
Clinton, who stepped down as secretary of State several years before the payment was made, bluntly described it as “old news” in an interview with a Colorado television station. “And, so far as I know, it had nothing to do with any kind of hostage swap or any other tit-for-tat”.
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“I have said the agreement has made the world safer, but it has to be enforced”.
