Sorry, Republicans, the $400 Million Wasn’t Ransom – It Was a Brilliant Play
The U.S. State Department Thursday says the federal government held up a $400 million payment owed to Iran to ensure service members were released. Republicans for weeks have been falsely claiming the U.S. paid Iran ransom for hostages, and the news today from the State Department has given that lie more fuel.
What actually happened, according to the AP and others, is that President Barack Obama used the $400 million payment that had already been negotiated as a bargaining chip to ensure the Americans were released quickly and released unharmed.Â
The Wall Street Journal Thursday called it “a tightly scripted exchange specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran.”
“U.S. officials wouldn’t let Iranians take control of the money until a Swiss Air Force plane carrying three freed Americans departed from Tehran on Jan. 17. Once that happened, an Iranian cargo plane was allowed to bring the cash home from a Geneva airport that day.”
Donald Trump earlier this month lied about seeing a top-secret video and lied when he falsely claimed that the U.S. paid $400 million in ransom to free sailors who had accidentally traveled into Iranian territory. Republicans for the past few weeks have been repeating these false claims, insisting the U.S. paid a ransom to free hostages – which the U.S. does not do and which President Obama reminded journalists during a press conference that he himself told those same journalists that the U.S. would be returning to Iran $400 million the Iranians had paid to the U.S. in the 1970s for arms, which the U.S. never delivered after the Iranian government was overthrown:
In fact, it was not ransom as the U.S. owed Iran the funds – which are part of a negotiated $1.7 billion agreement – and President Obama merely leveraged them to ensure safe return of our service members.
Donald Trump himself, were he not running for president, would likely call that good deal-making.
An op-ed in the Washington Post last week called the deal “American diplomacy at its finest.”
It’s not ransom when we already agreed to give them something that was rightfully theirs, and all we did was later stipulate that we had to get the service members back first. It would be ransom if we didn’t already owe them the money. It’s really quite simple – just not for conservatives.
Even the RNC flat out lied in a blog post on its official website: “State Dept. Admits Secret $400 Million Iran Payment Was Ransom.”
RNC Chair followed that up with an insane press release:
Right wing “news” sites and Republican extremists Thursday increasingly labeled the payment “ransom”:
Insanity. Get these people a dictionary.