For the second straight day, Donald Trump claimed at a campaign rally Thursday to have watched a “top secret” video showing the U.S. transferring huge piles of cash to Iran, despite his own campaign denying such video exists.
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American officials have said that the payment, an overdue installment of money owed from a 1970s arms deal, and the prisoner release were part of a controversial nuclear deal reached with Iran in 2015.
His spokeswoman said Wednesday night that Trump had mistaken a grainy video that has played repeatedly on Fox News for footage of a money transfer between the two governments in Iran.
On Twitter Friday morning, Trump wrote that he didn’t actually see a “top secret” video showing money being unloaded from a plane in Iran.
By then he had repeated the claim to a TV station, fueling the controversy. It was a tape that was a flawless angle – nice and steady.
“That means in order to embarrass us further Iran sent us the tapes”, Trump said.
On the campaign trail this week, the Republican nominee has been dramatically describing a video he says shows the U.S. paying off Iran as part of a deal to release United States sailors from Iranian custody, but there is no evidence such a tape exists.
After laughing at his obvious slip-up, Manafort explained that the GOP presidential candidate does not want to take positions in many primary races right now.
And in an interview with CBS This Morning that aired Friday, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said Trump had probably just confused the videos the way he had confused where Kaine had been governor.
The issue was eventually disputed at an worldwide tribunal at The Hague, and in January 2016, the US and Iranian governments reached a deal: The US government would give Iran $1.7 billion, which essentially amounts to what was paid for the fighter jets, accounting for inflation.
Naturally, this triggered Donald Trump’s paranoid imagination, and he began ranting about watching a “top secret” video, leaked by the Iranian government, of an airplane covertly delivering the cash. “Right? That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians”.
The bombastic Trump added that the tape was “given to us” by Iran to “embarrass our country and embarrass our president”, suggesting that the supposed footage was released by Iranian intelligence. “Iran, I don’t think you’ve heard this anywhere but here”.
Trump provided no source for this exclusive information but described in detail what he saw in the video.
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“They have been told these are classified briefings”, Obama said.
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It’s simply never a day any of us could ever expect to see out of the boisterous Republican candidate for President, the man who has quadrupled down on such outlandish claims like seeing “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims dance after 9/11 and insisting that John Miller is a real guy.
