The White House is still bizarrely obsessed with claiming the $400-million ransom paid to Iran for the release of American hostages was not a ransom, but the State Department has a bigger problem: It claims to have lost track of the other $1.3 billion paid to Iran as part of Barack Obamaâs nuclear deal.
âThe State Department confirmed Monday that the Obama administration has paid Iran another $1.3 billion to settle a failed arms deal from 1979, but couldnât describe who in the Iran government it paid, and couldnât say what form that payment took â cash, check or otherwise,â the Washington Examiner reports. âThe State Department also admitted it canât guarantee that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps wouldnât be able to get its hands on the money eventually.â
âI believe it was Iranian officials, Iranian government officials, I donât know particularly who individually it wasâŚÂ We can always hand it over to someone who can hand it over to the IRGC,â said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. Thatâs exactly what the strongest critics of Obamaâs nuclear deal said, except they didnât shrug when they said it.
Toner implied that some of his evasiveness was meant to protect the anonymity of the entities that helped ferry these bags of loot to Iran, which wonât exactly be comforting to the American people.
Writing for the New York Sun, Claudia Rosett notes the Judgment Fund database has no other payouts related to the State Department that could account for Iranâs $1.3 billion. The database contains no details about where these 13 mysterious payments went, and the Treasury Department did not respond to her request for comment.
Rosett further observes that the Judgment Fund normally pays using electronic funds transfer, and if such transfers were employed to steer this $1.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to Tehran, it would detonate President Obamaâs talking point that the $400 million cash ransom he flew to Iran in a cargo jet was necessary because âwe could not wire the money.â
As one final snub to the American people, if the Judgment Fund was indeed employed to circumvent Congress and pay off Iran, the mullahs received incredibly swift VIP service. The Fundâs website says to expect 6 to 8 weeks of processing time for payments, but the 13 fishy payments Rosett describes were made only two days after the Iran settlement was announced on January 17, and one of those days was a federal holiday.
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), who sits on the Armed Services Committee, blasted the Judgment Fund payments in an op-ed for the Omaha World-Herald on Tuesday, calling it âunacceptableâ and vowing that âit must not happen again.â
Fischer, who has been investigating the 13 mystery transactions since earlier this year â and seems to have little doubt they were indeed the Iran payments â has introduced legislation to âgive the American people and members of Congress greater oversight of the Judgment Fund.â
âEvents have proved that our bills are desperately needed to ensure responsible stewardship of both taxpayer dollars and something far, far more precious: American lives,â she wrote. âBy paying ransom to a foreign government in exchange for hostages, the Obama administration has sent a signal to the world that it can be bought. Service members stationed overseas, families on vacation and college students studying abroad are all now at greater risk because of it.â
Source: Breitbart