At his press conference yesterday, President Obama denied that we made a ransom payment to Iran, denied that the ransom payment was hidden and declined to respond to the question of the uses to which the ransom payment would be put (video below). Obama addressed the ransom payment for some seven minutes in his patented style, weaving in arrogance, condescension, disparagement and falsehood in roughly equal measure. Analyze this: “This wasn’t some nefarious deal.”
Supplement Obama’s performance with the account of freed hostage Saeed Abedini. Paul provides the transcript of Abedeni’s interview with Trish Regan on Fox Business News in part 5; the video is below.
Lee Smith adds an epilogue in the Weekly Standard editorial “Paying ransom to Iran.”
Quotable quote: “The $400 million that Obama aides say belongs to Iran should have long ago been distributed to Iran’s American victims and their families. Instead, it was U.S. taxpayers who compensated the victims of Iranian terror. And then we paid $400 million a second time, in January, to the Iranians themselves. The $1.3 billion of interest that the United States is supposed to have owed the Iranians is simply a fiction the Obama administration contrived to sweeten the pot, since the United States was under no legal obligation to pay Iran money that was no longer Iran’s. Yes, it was ransom, billed to the U.S. taxpayer.”
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