Republicans are proclaiming that they have proof via the State Department’s spokesperson that the Obama administration admitted to paying Iran $400 million in return for four US prisoners. However, none of this is actually true.
This is what the AP reported, “Spokesman John Kirby says negotiations over the United States’ returning Iranian money from a decades-old account was conducted separately from the prisoner talks. But he says the U.S. withheld delivery of the cash as leverage until the U.S. citizens had left Iran.”
Here is the 16-second video that the RNC released as proof:
John Kirby’s full and unedited answer:
As you can see, Kirby’s full answer states that the US was completely above board and the Obama administration concluded several diplomatic negotiations at the same time. Kirby said, “We were able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24 hour period, and oh, by the way, you can go back and look at your own work that was done back then, and you’ll see that we were completely above board about this. Even the President himself talked about the timing. We able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24 hour period including implementation of the nuclear deal, the prisoner talks, and the settlement of an outstanding Hauge claim that saved American taxpayers potentially billions of dollars. As we said at the time, we deliberately leveraged that moment to finalize these outstanding issues nearly simultaneously.
It’s already publicly known that we returned to Iran its $400 million in that same time period as part of the Hauge settlement agreement. With concerns that Iran would renege on the prisoner release given unnecessary delays regarding persons in Iran who could not be located as well as to be quite honest mutual mistrust between Iran and the United States. We, of course, sought to retain maximum leverage until after American citizens were released that was our top priority.
Kirby repeated numerous times that the US position was to make sure that the prisoners were released before Iran got their money back. If anything, it was the Americans holding up the Hauge agreement to give Iran back its own money until the prisoners were returned, which is the opposite of what Republicans are suggesting happened.
The US did not pay Iran $400 million of taxpayer money to get four prisoners back. What the Obama administration did was make sure that they got the prisoners back before they sent Iran their own money.
What the Obama administration did was smart, what Republicans are suggesting happened is a total lie.
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