But Abedini’s release became more controversial this week when a Wall Street Journal piece accused the Obama administration of paying a de facto ransom for the prisoners in the form of a $400 million cash payment delivered by plane the same day.
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The Obama administration’s payment of 400 million in cash to Iran, that coincided with the release of American prisoners, was not essentially a ransom payment.
“We do not pay ransom for hostages”, President Barack Obama said Thursday during a news conference at the Pentagon after meeting with his national security advisers.
Officials say the $400 million is part of a payment plan to settle a really old weapons order from the ’70s – before the Iranian revolution and the US froze the country’s assets.
Trump initially claimed to have seen video of the cash being unloaded from a United States aircraft in Iran and repeated the assertion on Thursday even though a campaign aide had told The Washington Post earlier that it was actually footage of a different event. Such a video does not appear to exist. The billionaire further stated that the video was provided to “embarrass our president because we have a president who’s incompetent”.
“They have a ideal tape, obviously done by a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane”, Trump continued.
News outlets label that footage as being shot in Geneva around the same time the Americans were freed.
Donald Trump, a cirrhotic cheetah liver dusted in gold leaf, claimed Thursday that he saw a video of a completely bananas thing. We have a number of Americans being held all around the world.
He also claimed the tape was “top secret”. President Obama says the backlash over the payment is an attempt by Republicans to distract Americans from the success of the nuclear deal.
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“We call them terrorists and I don’t believe they are going to use this money for building orphanages, which I was arrested for, but I prefer that the politicians answer this question”. Obama Administration officials say the payment settled a decades-long dispute negotiated by an worldwide court at The Hague and the timing was coincidental. Over there where that plane landed, top secret, they don’t have a lot of paparazzi, you know the paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there, right, and they have a flawless tape done by obviously a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane, right? Instead, it was US taxpayers who compensated the victims of Iranian terror. The payment, which the administration announced the following day, coincided with the lifting of global sanctions against Tehran as part of a historic nuclear deal reached a year ago.
