Ransom

Oh my.

The President of the United States and his Secretary of State paid ransom money to the Iranians to retrieve the U. S. sailors captured by Iran.

U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed

Obama administration insists there was no quid pro quo, but critics charge payment amounted to ransom

By JAY SOLOMON and CAROL E. LEE, The Wall Street Journal

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.

Any question as to this rising to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors?”

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.

One must wonder what else Mr. Obama has failed to tell his employers (the People of the United States)…

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.

Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

UPDATE

Quid Pro Quo

Former US Iranian Hostage Saeed Abidini told FOX Business Network today the Iranian regime WOULD NOT let his plane leave Tehran until the ransom plane arrived.
They waited on the tarmac for hours.

Saeed Abidini: I just remember the night at the airport sitting for hours and hours there and I asked police— why you not letting us go — And he told me we are waiting for another plane and if that plane take off we gonna let you go.

Trish Regan: You slept there at the airport?

Abidini: Yes, for a night. They told us you going to be there for 20 minutes but it took hours and hours. And I ask them why you don’t let us go, because the — was there, pilot was there, everyone was there to leave the country. And he said we are waiting for another plane so if that plane doesn’t come we never let us go.