Republicans make big deal over supposedly secret ransom paid to Iran that wasn't secret or a ransom

Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades) · Wednesday, August 03, 2016, 1:58 pm

The Wall Street Journal treated it as a scoop. Republicans, including GOP Party Chairman Reince Priebus, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, and Donald Trump are using it as a cudgel to pound on the Obama administration, taking special aim at Hillary Clinton.

The claim—first published by the Journal Tuesday evening—is that the United States secretly paid Iran a ransom of $1.7 billion, $400 million of it in cash, for the release in January of four American citizens the Tehran government had imprisoned. One of those was Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post correspondent.

The United States released seven imprisoned Iranians at the same time as the Americans were released as part of a prisoner swap. A fifth American was also released at the time, but was not part of the swap.

The only part of the Journal story that is new, however, is the revelation that cash was used as part of the payment, and that there were secret arrangements for collecting Swiss francs and other foreign currencies and loading them onto pallets for the unmarked cargo-plane trip to Tehran. The payment itself was announced and reported in the press seven months ago.

In fact, the White House noted in a January response to critics that the payment had nothing to do with prisoner releases, but rather was a settlement dating back to a disputed 1979 U.S.-Iranian arrangement that was interrupted by the Iranian revolution. In other words, the $400 million was Iran’s money that had been sequestered for more than 35 years by the United States.

Republicans nonetheless see this as another opportunity to blast the administration for both the international nuclear deal with Iran and also to claim that President Obama and Hillary Clinton are weak on terrorism.

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