Negotiations regarding the cash payment were conducted separately from the negotiations regarding the prisoners, affirmed spokesman John Kirby.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accused the adminstration of a quid pro quo that undermined America’s longstanding opposition to ransom payments.
“First of all, this was Iran’s money”, Kirby told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “OutFront”. “It was money that was awarded to them by the Hague tribunal and it was a process that had been working independently for many months prior to that”.
“It would have been foolish, imprudent and irresponsible for us not to try to maintain maximum leverage”.
The US newspaper “The Wall Street Journal” reported on Thursday new details of the crisscrossing planes on January 16.
Trump’s opponent in the race for the White House, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was no longer serving as the nation’s top diplomat when the accord came into effect.
An administration official just called it shrewd negotiating.
At the State Department’s daily press briefing, Associated Press journalist Bradley Klapper asked Spokesman John Kirby, “You’re saying that you wouldn’t give them the 400 million in cash until the prisoners were released”.
Jason Rezaian, Washington Post reporter and one of the USA citizens recently released from detention in Iran, poses to media outside the Emergency Room of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in the southwestern town of Landstuhl, Germany, January 20, 2016.
Obama denied any connection between the money and the prisoners..
“We announced these payments in January”.
“We do not pay ransom for hostages”, the president said at an August 4 briefing.
The excised portion of a Dec 2, 2013, briefing included a question about whether an earlier spokeswoman for the department had misled reporters about whether the United States was holding secret direct nuclear talks with Iran. Now the Administration has put every American travelling overseas, including our military personnel, at greater risk of being kidnapped. Dianne Feinstein told USA Today. “I think we would all have preferred to arrive at clear and convincing answers but that’s not where the evidence or the memories of so many employees about an event, which happened more than two and a half years ago, have taken us”.
Iran will receive the balance of $400 million in the Trust Fund, as well as a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest.
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One of the Americans released in January as part of the prisoner exchange, a pastor named Saeed Abedini, said he and other American prisoners were kept waiting at Mehrabad airport from January 16 to the morning of January 17. Now “terrorist groups and our adversaries around the world” know the USA will pay “cold, hard cash for hostages”, Cotton said.
