Between January 2014 and July 2015, when the Obama administration was hammering out the final details of the nuclear accord, Iran was paid $700 million every month from funds that had previously been frozen by U.S. sanctions.
A total of $11.9 billion was ultimately paid to Iran, but the details surrounding these payments remain shrouded in mystery, according to Mark Dubowitz, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In total, “Iran may have received as much as $33.6 billion in cash or in gold and other precious metals,” Dubowitz disclosed.
New questions about these payments are emerging following confirmation from top Obama administration officials on Thursday that it was forced to pay Iran $1.7 billion in cash prior to the release of several U.S. hostages earlier this year. The administration insisted that cash had to be used for this payment.
Top administration officials were adamant that the cash payments were the best way to ensure that Iran got immediate access to this money due to its ongoing difficulty accessing international funds still sanctioned by the West.
Lawmakers and others are now pressing the administration to disclose how a slew of other payments to Iran were made in the years leading up to the final nuclear accord……
Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and expert on rogue regimes, said that cash payments of this nature are “highly irregular.”
“There’s no reason it needed to be paid now. After all, successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have delayed payments so as to avoid funding Iranian terrorism,” Rubin said. “Likewise, if the United States freezes accounts linked to al Qaeda or Hamas, releasing it and saying, ‘It’s their money anyway,’ would not be a tenable explanation. Cash payments are highly irregular.”
The Iranians have been clear that they “perceived the payment to be a ransom” despite the administration’s protestations, Rubin explained.
“Not only has the delivery of the millions of dollars been perceived as a ransom, provided as an incentive to seize more hostages …. but because the money was delivered in cash the payment bolstered the strength of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and augmented its ability to finance and conduct terrorism,” he said.
Full Title :
Iran may have received $33.6 BILLION in secret payments facilitated by Obama administration
But all the really smart people have said the Obama administration is remarkably scandal-free.
That is making me absolutely crazy. I cannot believe it.
I just can’t. I cannot even comprehend it, if true. 33 billion dollars? 33 billion?
This makes me sick to my stomach.
It appears that the U.S. State Department is the top state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Can we sanction them?
And we work like slaves to fund these payments involuntarily. How I loathe this president and the former Secretary of State.
Of course Obama did. He’s handled by Valerie Jarrett, an Iranian operative.
Why isn’t this front page on every paper and screaming across every new banner?!
Our guys are overseas being slaughtered by Iranian IEDs when our commander in chief is paying them? I can’t even begin to to say what I want. Everyone involved should be impeached and imprisoned.
I hope our next president has the fortitude to look into the $33billion payoff to Iran and have people arrested and charged with treason.
$33B + $400M + $1.3B = $34.7B
300 million Americans
Spread over every person in the country is $116 per person.
The jerk in charge needs to go to prison.
The media are burying it. Do a google search for “iran 33.6 billion” and you’ll see they are ignoring it.
33B to Iran and no impeachment hearings? I don’t care if it is Obama’s last day in office the congress should do its duty.
Now can we impeach the bastid?
If you discard anything the regime says and just look at their actions in the neighborhood-- mid-east North Africa and elsewhere,its all about chaos.
The cabal/NWO has mandated that zeros regime create as much chaos as possible to keep things stirred up so they can take over regime after regime and it worked and is working. Iran will stir the pot in the region like no one else
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http://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-114-ba09-wstate-mdubowitz-20160908.pdf
This summer marked the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This deal is fatally flawed in that it provides the Islamic Republic of Iran with a patient pathway to nuclear weapons capability by placing limited, temporary, and reversible constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities. These nuclear “sunset provisions,” which will begin to expire in seven years and mostly disappear over a period of ten to fifteen years,1 leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power with an industrial-size uranium enrichment and plutonium program, near-zero nuclear breakout capacity, an advanced centrifuge-powered clandestine sneakout capability, advanced ballistic missile and ICBM programs, access to advanced heavy weaponry, greater regional hegemony, and a more powerful economy that could be immune to Western sanctions.
Even as Iran temporarily scales back some of its nuclear activities under the JCPOA, the regime’s illicit efforts to obtain proliferation-related technology continues while its other non-nuclear malign activities are expanding.
The deal – as well as the interim agreement known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) – provided Iran with substantial economic relief that helped the regime avoid a severe economic crisis and return to a modest recovery path.
The lifting of restrictions on Iran’s use of frozen overseas assets as part of the interim agreement returned about $11.9 billion to Iran. The final agreement provided Tehran with access to a further $100 billion, including over $50 billion in unencumbered, liquid cash, according to the Obama administration.
2 These funds gave Tehran badly needed hard currency to settle its outstanding debts, begin to repair its economy, build up its diminished foreign exchange reserves, and ease a budgetary crisis, as well as providing the regime greater resources for the financing of terrorism and other illicit activities.
The nuclear deal did nothing to address the full range of Iran’s malign activities, including ballistic missile development, support for terrorism, regional destabilization, and human rights abuses. Iran also still owes American terrorism victims and their families more than $55 billion in unpaid, outstanding damages awarded by American courts.
Is Iran an “enemy”?
Is $33 Billion “aid and comfort”?
Does the U.S. government have a length of rope?
Now we’re talking about real money that you can use to attack the United States.