Both events occurred January 17, fueling suspicions from Republican lawmakers and accusations from GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump of a quid pro quo that undermined America’s longstanding opposition to ransom payments.
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“You’re saying that you wouldn’t give [Iran] the $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”
Republican Sen. John McCain, himself a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said the administration “paid ransom to the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism and has been trying to deny it ever since”.
In fact, for years, one of the main arguments put forth by Obama’s critics was that in his zeal to strike a nuclear deal the president was ignoring Iranian bad behavior – including the imprisonment of USA citizens.
We raise these points to underscore the complexity of the issues surrounding this transaction.
“The payment of the $400 million was not done until after the prisoners were released”, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
Since the release of the prisoners, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, the US administration has said that the exchange was a coincidence with the implementation of the nuclear deal with Iran.
Of course, from there Obama’s critics might have seized on a new, and maybe stickier, point: If we can’t trust the Iranians to release a handful of prisoners, why do we think they’ll live up to the key parts of the nuclear deal?
The Jan. 17 agreement involved the return of the $400 million, plus an additional $1.3 billion in interest, terms that Obama described as favorable compared to what might have been expected from a tribunal set up in The Hague to rule on claims between the two countries.
“It was ransom. We now know it was ransom”, Royce said. “What we thought and hoped would be a smooth culmination day ended up being hardly that”.
Unfortunately for the administration, not many buy its line that the payment wasn’t ransom, especially because it has now admitted a link between the payment and the release of Americans.
The State Department’s letter in response repeated previous administration claims that the cash transfer and prisoner exchange were not connected.
The admission came after the Wall St. Journal reported that the four Americans were released through a carefully orchestrated deal that included removing sanctions from Iran Air the day before the release of U.S. Pastor Saeed Abedini, Washington Post Tehran Bureau Chief Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati and a businessman Nosratollah Khosrawi-Roodsari.
When word leaked the US paid Iran $400 million in cash after the release of several prisoners in January, the State Department and President Barack Obama denied the payment was a ransom, refusing to answer questions about whether the cash was a factor in the prisoners’ release.
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Maybe the negotiations were separate to begin with (should we still take their word on that?), but as soon as things started looking iffy the administration made the release of the money contingent on the release of the prisoners.
