President Obama makes a statement from the White House regarding the release of Americans by Iran on January 17.
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USA officials also have said that the prisoner release and the arms-deal settlement were negotiated through separate diplomatic channels, and denied that the two were linked.
Thanks to a bill by U.S. Senator (and Obama golfing buddy) Bob Corker, though, this guaranteed defeat became a guaranteed victory. “That was our top priority”, Kirby said. “And that’s exactly what the administration did and I think it’s very much the right thing”.
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 the United States’ long-standing opposition to ransom payments. Several members of Congress immediately pounced on Thursday’s shift.
“If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”, Sen.
The first installment of that payment came in a $400 million cash delivery made up of euros and Swiss francs.
“The president himself talked about the timing”, Kirby said on Thursday.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign said on Thursday that the State Department’s acknowledgement “further cements Hillary Clinton’s role in crafting disastrous policies that have led to a more unsafe world”.
“He denied it was for the hostages, but it was”, Trump said. The administration has argued that paying ransom is against USA policy and that the money already belonged to the Iranians, independent of the situation with the prisoners. “He lied about the hostages, openly and blatantly”. It came one day after The Wall Street Journal reported new details about the incident. The fourth American left on a commercial flight.
“There was truly a profound lack of trust on this very hard prisoner exchange track”, a senior administration official said of the secret talks with Iran, “and even over the final 48 hours, there were repeated indications that our people may not actually ever be permitted to leave Iran”.
“In basic English, you’re saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?” a reporter asked. Iran wasn’t using the hostages to get more from the United States than it was entitled to; the United States was using Iran’s money – funds Iran had paid for weapons that the USA never delivered – to ensure that Iran fulfilled its promise to release Americans who shouldn’t have been held. The equipment was never delivered after the shah’s government was overthrown in 1979 and revolutionaries took American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. “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 even that trade-off faced several difficulties on the busy diplomatic weekend in January that also included the Iranians complying with last year’s nuclear accord and the US lifting many oil, trade and banking sanctions on Iran – context, the official said, that played into the administration’s decision making with the $400 million. But he and other officials have consistently denied any linkages. This is another example in a long line of efforts by the Obama Administration to mislead the American people.
In those crucial hours, the official said, the Iranians leaked information about the deal to the media, detained the American prisoners at the airport as they were preparing to leave and even led negotiators to believe they might return the prisoners to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
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The White House said it paid the $400 million from Iranian funds frozen since 1981, plus $1.3 billion in interest owed to Iran, to settle a decades-old Iranian claim for reimbursement of military equipment purchased by the Shah of Iran.
