163-a-02-(Christopher Backemeyer, assistant secretary of state for Iranian Affairs, testifying before House Financial Services subcommittee)-“for cash deal”-Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Backemeyer says the USA did not pay ransom”.
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The Obama administration admitted to lawmakers on Tuesday that an additional $1.3 billion was transferred to Iran apart from the initial payment of $400 million on January 17.
The Obama administration acknowledged this week that the $1.7 billion payment to Iran to remedy a decades old financial dispute was made entirely in cash, causing a new wave of uproar among critics.
Republican senators have endorsed similar legislation that would bar payments from the Judgment Fund to Iran until Tehran pays the almost $55.6 billion that USA courts have judged that it owes to American victims of Iranian terrorism.
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“He gave the Iranians money to get Americans out of jail – to think anything else is insane”, Graham said on CNN last month.
“Certainly, there are other ways to make an immediate payment other than a middle-of-the-night what-appears-to-be a drug drop”, Fitzpatrick said.
Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, asked the president why the payments were made in cash; whether Iran had requested cash; whether there were concerns the money could not be tracked like a wire transfer; whether there was evidence any of the money had been used for terrorist activity; and whether any other settlement negotiations with Iran are underway.
Members of the Rouhani administration have been keen to stress that the payment – much like the nuclear deal – was the result of productive negotiations.
The previous government of Iran, under the leadership of Mohammad Reza Shah, who had good relations with the United States and the West, gave $400 million to the United States for the purchase of fighter jets.
“The form of those principal and interest payments – made in non-U.S. currency, in cash – was necessitated by the effectiveness of US and worldwide sanctions regimes over the last several years in isolating Iran from the global financial system”. “We shouldn’t have paid the ransom”.
“As far as Iran and this payment goes”, Sherman stated.
“It didn’t surprise me that whatever we do with Iran would be cash”, he said. Officials denied those were linked, but then the WSJ revealed the $400 million was sent as cash stacked on “wooden pallets… on an unmarked cargo plane” and the transfer was a “tightly scripted exchange specifically timed” to the hostage release [a][b]. The report claimed that negotiations over the release of prisoners were done quietly at the orders of the United States, given the bitter history of former Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage negotiations.
The Treasury Department has said the payments had to be made in cash because sanctions on Iran have successfully isolated the country from the worldwide financial system.
That account has been characterized by the government as a “permanent, indefinite appropriation” created by Congress in 1956 to relieve lawmakers of the chore of making individual appropriations for every final judgment or settlement rendered against the USA government. It was originally believed and confirmed by the State Department that the Iran deal was just for $400 million.
The money was sent in three installments, over the course of January and February of this year.
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The money came from a fund administered by the Treasury Department that is used to settle litigation claims, according to the Los Angeles Times.
