SCANDALOUS: Obama Secretly Pays King’s Ransom To Iran

The Obama Administration did more than “TALK” to the Iranians. It looks like they struck a payment deal.

The kind of deal where America loads $400 million in cash onto pallets and secretly flies it to Tehran. The kind of deal where when all that cash lands in Iran, suddenly four American prisoners are released.

From there this scandal just gets worse for President Obama.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

IF the US Government secretly paid a ransom for prisoners…all bets are off. President Obama will have broken a long held US policy toward prisoners abroad. We just don’t pay ransoms. End of story, because the minute you start down that road…the US could be held hostage for millions and millions more for every American captured. In the end, it puts a bounty on every American head and leaves the Government no leg to stand on.

Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.

But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Barack Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”

“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.

Since the cash shipment, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. Tehran has also detained dual-nationals from France, Canada and the U.K. in recent months.

What do the Iranian’s have to say about the $400 million?

Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense officials describing the cash as a ransom payment. The Iranian foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The $400 million was paid in foreign currency because any transaction with Iran in U.S. dollars is illegal under U.S. law. Sanctions also complicate Tehran’s access to global banks.

Since it is ILLEGAL to do what Obama did in US dollars, he actually sent pallets of foreign money to Iran rather than get permission from Congress. Instead of playing by the rules and arguing the merits of perhaps lifting the sanctions that made paying Iran in US dollars illegal, Obama and Company under the cover of night thwarted US law and did it their way…secretly.

Well, nothing stays secret forever…and these chickens might be coming home to roost for President Obama.

President Obama approved the shipment of the $400 million. But accumulating so much cash presented a logistical and security challenge, said U.S. and European officials. One person briefed on the operation joked: “You can’t just withdraw that much money from ATMs.”

Mr. Kerry and the State and Treasury departments sought the cooperation of the Swiss and Dutch governments. Ultimately, the Obama administration transferred the equivalent of $400 million to their central banks. It was then converted into other currencies, stacked onto the wooden pallets and sent to Iran on board a cargo plane.