‘Confidentiality”?
Yes, that’s the State Department’s story on why the Obama administration is stonewalling the American people regarding the president’s illegal and increasingly suspicious Iransom payoff. The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”
Whose confidentiality? The mullahs’? That of the intermediaries the president used? Whose privacy takes precedence over our right to know how Obama funneled our money to our enemies?
The closest thing to an answer we have to the latest round of questions comes courtesy of the perseverance of the investigative journalist Claudia Rosett. (You weren’t expecting the Republican Congress to be minding the purse, were you?)
Recall that we have been asking about the $1.3 billion payment since the first revelations about this sordid affair. After all, if, as Obama and his toadies maintain, the payment is totally on the up and up — just a routine legal settlement involving Iran’s own money — then why won’t they answer basic questions about it?
Why are such matters as the administration’s process in tapping a congressionally appropriated funding source for the settlement — a settlement Congress did not approve and seems to be in the dark about paying for — being treated as if they were state secrets so sensitive you’d need have a Clinton.mail account (or be a Russian hacker of a Clinton.mail account) to see them?
Generally speaking, the State, Treasury, and Justice Departments cannot issue press releases fast enough to salute themselves over legal settlements that supposedly benefit taxpayers by billions of dollars — at least according to the same math that brought you all those Obamacare savings. How is it that, in what is purportedly a completely aboveboard legal case, we are not permitted to know how our own money was transferred to the jihadist plaintiff?
With the administration taking the Fifth, it was left to Claudia to crawl through Leviathan’s catacombs. In her New York Sun report on Monday, we learned that she hit pay dirt: stumbling upon a bizarre string of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — yes, all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.” The transfers were made — to whom, it is not said — on January 19, just two days after the administration announced it had reached the $1.7 billion settlement with Iran. They aggregate to just 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion, the same amount the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution.
So, stacked atop of the pallets of $400 million in foreign cash that Obama arranged to shuttle from Geneva to Tehran as ransom (or, as the administration prefers, “leverage”) for the release of American hostages — via an unmarked cargo plane belonging to Iran Air, a terrorist arm of the mullahs’ terrorist coordinator, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — we now have a second whopping money transfer that (a) violates federal criminal laws against providing things of value to Iran and (b) looks like it was conceived by Nicky Barnes.
