True that it was Iran’s money- not true that it was this regime’s money since they did not come to power legitimately.
The funds should have been held in trust until a legitimate elected government comes to power. The reason Obama did it was most likely to make it that much more difficult for those protestors interested in toppling the Mullahs to establish a government and plan and fund elections.
I doubt the Obama admin was ever seriously fighting the case in the international court. If the deal had been a reasonable one to ‘save us money’ as is claimed Obama would not have had to go through the lengths he did to do an end run around congress and would not have used the fund he did- which was NOT the Iranian account but was from an emergency account funded with US taxpayer’s money. Nor would he have had to launder the money into various other currencies...instead congress could have made an exemption for the deal so that the gyrations and wiggling over sanctions violations would be unnecessary.
Holding that money for a legitimate government sounds interesting. Did you read my link in Comment #16. That article said we could not use US dollars to pay the money to Iran. Rather we had to gather up non dollar money that had come into our possession overseas. This should be easy enough to check from other sources if you don’t trust my link’s publisher. Many years ago I worked for an NGO with offices in South America and the Caribbean. We had AID contracts in various countries. When we had to fund a local program we had to use “counterpart” funds, which were non US dollar money which our embassies had in their possession. Sounds like still the same law in effect used for the Iran payment.