Seizing on new details about a $400 million cash payment by the U.S.to Iran as American detainees were being freed in January, Trump said at a Florida rally on Wednesday that Iran had released video of people taking money from the plane to embarrass the U.S. However, the incident caused the United States to freeze all of their assets, and the payment was never made.
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On Thursday, President Obama said the payment to Iran, which coincided with the release of four Americans held in Tehran, was not a ransom. President Obama says that the payment, made in January, was actually part of a deal to resolve a decades-old arms dispute. A fifth American was released separately. The settlement is reported to have been less than the arbiter was prepared to award Iran over the collapsed 1979 arms deal that left Iran’s money frozen in a USA trust fund.
“It wasn’t a secret”.
“The issue is not so much that it was a coincidence, as it is that we were able to have a direct discussion”, he said.
On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal reported that the chunk of cash had been loaded on wooden pallets and secretly airlifted to Iran in an unmarked cargo plane.
The footage, which could not be independently verified, shows images of large stacks of hard currency and features claims that the Obama administration sent this money over as part of an effort to free several USA hostages.
Below, we break down both his comments Wednesday and Thursday, and what was wrong with them.
However, US officials, while denying a connection, have publicly admitted that the timing of the two transactions – US prisoners leaving Iran as hundreds of millions of dollars arrived – involved problematic optics. “The only bit of news is that we paid cash”.
Obama confirmed on Thursday that Donald Trump will get national security briefings, but he warned the Republican candidate, whom he has called “unfit” for office, that information from the meetings must be kept secret. “It doesn’t exist”, referring to the video of Iran receiving $400 million.
To the frustration of Trump’s aides and fellow Republicans, the celebrity businessman has all too often proven unable to let go of a bad story, often instead fueling it like he did this past week when he escalated a flap with the parents of a slain USA soldier who was Muslim at the expense of the campaign’s message.
In response to The Washington Post, Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks later confirmed the presidential candidate was actually talking about a widely shown video of a private plane carrying the four U.S. hostages landing in Switzerland.
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Trump’s flub was yet another unforced error in a week of unforced errors. This story is not a new story.
