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The Iran Threat

Confirmed: That $400 Million in Pallets of Foreign Cash Was a Ransom Payment

The President lied while wagging his finger at us.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | August 19, 2016

“In basic English, you’re saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”

That’s correct.”

With those words, State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed two things about the $400 Million cash payment to Iran.  First, it was a ransom for hostages.  Second, the President directly lied to the American people about it.

Families “know we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom. And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them ‘We don’t pay ransom,’ defies logic,” Obama added at the time.

As the New York Post reports, the President not only lied to the American people, he even lectured the press for raising the question.

Here at CounterJihad, we pointed out that the President broke US law and knowingly endangered American lives by this action.  Three days later, former Federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy spelled out the specific laws that President Obama violated in great detail.  Now it is clear that the President lied about it, too.

American officials would not permit the Iran Air officials to take possession of the money and depart for Iran until they received word that a Swiss Air flight on which the U.S. hostages were boarded in Iran was “wheels up.” Only after the American officials were notified that the hostages’ plane had taken off were the Iranians allowed to take custody of the money. As Senators Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) have pointed out in pressing the administration for answers about this transaction:

Although the administration has denied there was any quid pro quo, the close temporal proximity of the payment to the release of the hostages suggests otherwise.  As the Justice Department is never remiss to point out in court, an illicit quid pro quo can be inferred from the timing of the quid and the quo

So, to recap, the President himself said that the US government has a policy of not paying ransom for hostages.  He explained the reasoning for this policy in that paying ransom for hostages endangers American lives by making it more likely that people will take Americans hostage.  He then undertook to pay a ransom for hostages, lying about it to the American people and even chiding the free press for having the gall to bring it up.

This is clearly an impeachable offense.  The President knew what he was doing.  He knew it was wrong.  He did it anyway, and he kept it secret from both Congress and the American People.  In doing so, he violated both the law and the basic rules of statecraft.  That violation of the law raises this to the level of ‘high crimes or misdemeanors’ necessary to justify an impeachment.  The endangerment of American lives makes it more than a harmless oversight.  More Americans since have been taken hostage by the regime in Iran, an effect so obvious and predictable that even Mr. Obama knew it was going to happen if he paid the ransom.

He did it anyway.

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