In yet another major international scandal coming from the Obama White House, the president delivered an estimated $1.3 billion in freshly minted cash to the nation of Iran earlier this year. This was done as a follow-up after an initial and widely reported $400 million “ransom” payment, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ remarked that U.S. lawmakers had been briefed about these payments, several months after the president authorized the delivery of a (then) total of $1.7 billion in foreign currency to Iran sometime between Jan. 17 and Feb. 5 of this year.
The $1.3 billion to be sent subsequently was transferred in precisely the same way as the earlier $400 million- via an Iranian military cargo plane which stopped on its way in Switzerland.
The lawmakers were outraged when they learned of the $400 million initial payment, which- the timing would suggest was part of a hostage negotiation for the release of five American prisoners of war.
When pressed on the issue, officials acknowledged that the first $400 million payment was delivered for use as leverage to help secure the prisoner’s release- a payment that many critics of the move are calling a ransom payment. But the president vehemently denies this allegation.
When the news of an additional $1.3 billion reached the desk of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, he pledged to introduce new legislation that would block any subsequent payments to Iran from the White House. Entitled the ‘No Ransom Payments Act,’ this measure would require the nation of Iran to return the payments that it has received already.
“The U.S. government should never go into the business of negotiating with, much less paying ransom to, terrorists and paying them vast sums of money for the exchange and release of American hostages,” Rubio is quoted as saying.
Oddly enough, the $1.7 billion settlement has its roots in the early 1980s. At that time Iran had paid the first Bush Administration $400 million for replacement airplane parts, a shipment in military hardware that was never delivered, according to the Wall Street Journal.
To resolve the issue, the U.S. elected to pursue arbitration to remedy the debt. This was done out of fear that the interest would have meant a multiplication of the original debt to as much as four billion dollars above and beyond what has already been paid.
Washington officials told the WSJ that the $1.7 billion came from a fund within that Treasury Department that was established to handle court judgments and settlements between the U.S. and other nations.
What opponents cannot seem to be content about is, why we are honoring debts to a nation that is holding American hostages. The official story from time immemorial is that Iran is a rogue nation and one of the world’s greatest funders of international terrorism. Would that money not have been better spent on air strikes?
This month, we learn that Iran may have received an additional $33.6 billion in the form of cash and gold payments by the Obama White House between the years 2014 and 2016. This, according to testimony delivered to Congress from a recognized expert on the Iranian nuclear agreement according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The payments occurred, allegedly, just as the Obama administration was working out the finishing details, with Iran- which was to be paid no less than $700 million each month, for a grand total of $11.9 billion. This would come from funds that had been previously frozen through U.S. sanctions on Iran.
In total- “Iran might have been given as much as $33.6 billion in cash, gold, and other valuable metals,” Mark Dubowitz, the executive director for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, testified before Congress according to the Free Beacon.
“It is crucial that we learn how these funds were sent,” he went on. “In the worst-case scenario, there is the possibility that Iran might have received no less than $33.6 billion in freshly minted- hard to trace currency gold and other precious metals.”
The Obama administration admitted that the current sanctions and restrictions made it difficult to transfer funds to Iran through more conventional means.
At a time when the nation is facing a possible second Clinton administration which has been embroiled in scandal and controversy since the early 1990s, we are faced with the realization that our current president has been shipping cash by the ton to a rogue nation and aspiring nuclear power.
What vexes the conservative sensibility most may be the constant drone of Obama supporters that his tenure in the White House has been totally free of scandal.
~American Liberty Report
