As Trump’s mess takes over the news cycle, Republicans try to accuse Obama of bribing Iran
Source: International Business Times
August 3, 2016
Himanshu Goenka
Posted with permission from International Business Times
January 16, when Iran released four U.S. citizens who had been arrested and imprisoned in the country, the administration of President Barack Obama agreed to release seven Iranians either jailed in the U.S. or facing charges. But according to a report Tuesday, there could be more to the seemingly simple prisoner swap deal than meets the eye.
January was a busy time for U.S.-Iran relations, with the implementation of the nuclear deal Iran had reached in July 2016, the prisoner swap, as well as a settlement between the two countries of a dispute over a failed arms deal signed almost 40 years ago. This settlement amounted to $1.7 billion that the U.S. had to pay Iran.
A report in the Wall Street Journal said that around the time of the prisoner swap in January this year, the U.S. government “secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran.” U.S. and European officials with knowledge of the matter told the newspaper that “euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane,” and that the money came “from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland.” U.S. law makes it illegal to conduct transactions with Iran in dollars.
While U.S. officials have acknowledged that Iranian negotiators discussing the prisoner swap wanted some money, if only to show they had gained something by way of a ransom, they also stressed that no money was actually paid for the Americans’ release. State Department spokesman John Kirby said: “The negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim… were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home. … Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”
-snip-
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/as-trumps-mess-takes-over-the-news-cycle-republicans-try-to-accuse-obama-of-bribing-iran/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal prints the story; Fox News runs with it and everyone else picks it up. The same operation as it was in the 90's, albeit back then it began with Murdoch owned papers in England and/or Australia ("foreign newspapers are reporting"
; picked up by the NY Post, Fox News and then the MSM.
