Donald Trump has made a rare admission he was wrong – in claiming he saw a video of a US cash payment going to Iran.
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The U.S. indeed paid that money to Tehran in January, in a publicly announced settlement of a decades-old global arbitration case dating back to when Iranians paid Washington for military equipment they never received.
“We do not pay ransom for hostages”.
However, his claims to have seen a video of cash being delivered in a plane to the Iranians are being dismissed by media organisations as well as the White House. “We have stood up an entire section of interagency experts who devote all of their time to working with these families to get these Americans out, but those families know that we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom”, Obama said. “He hasn’t. Iran is stronger than ever – and there is nothing to prevent its regime from using this cash infusion to strengthen its nuclear program or fund terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah”, he said.
Amid Republican panic over his cratering in national and state polls, Trump tweeted early Friday morning: “The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!”
“But none of this is surprising from an Administration that allowed its Secretary of State to threaten the country with a private email server, delete her records, and lie about it to us all”, he said.
“Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this frightful deal and now they’re a power”, Trump said Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Florida.
“Some of you may recall we announced these payments in January. Many months ago. They were not a secret”, Obama said during a news conference at the Pentagon.
When asked if he believed the USA government paid a “ransom” to free him and the other Americans, Abedini didn’t provide a direct answer.
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 GOP nominee suggested the money would find its way into the pockets of officials or be diverted towards terrorism, he said. A fifth American was released separately. It was possible that the administration made it look like a ransom payment. “It doesn’t represent anything the American people weren’t told by the President and by the administration”. “And so we’ve always been aware of it, but that didn’t keep us from, frankly, sealing a deal that saved the American taxpayers a considerable sum of money”.
Iran had been seeking more than $10 billion in arbitration.
Meanwhile, Obama maintained that the Iran nuclear deal has “actually worked” and that Tehran has “abided by the deal”.
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Officials also said the cash was delivered in such an unorthodox manner because Iran was still isolated from the global financial system owing to worldwide sanctions.
