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The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the United States secretly sent $400 million in cash on an unmarked cargo plane to Iran on January 17, 2016, to facilitate a swap that day of four innocent Americans held by Iran for seven Iranian criminals held by the U.S. Fourteen additional Iranians were removed from an INTERPOL wanted list as another part of this arrangement.
The prisoner swap was announced on the Iran deal’s Implementation Day (January 16) — when most sanctions were lifted from Iran and it received $150 billion in sanctions relief after the IAEA certified that Tehran had complied with certain requirements of the nuclear deal.
Obama officials have denied that the $400 million was a ransom payment. Instead, they say it was the first installment of an American payment to resolve a dispute over a pre-1979 arms deal with the Shah’s government.
According to the Journal article, the U.S. sent Iran wooden pallets of euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies because U.S. transactions with Iran in dollars are illegal under American law. Obama officials are asserting that the timing of the cash shipment to Iran was coincidental and that the negotiations to convince Iran to free the U.S. prisoners “were completely separate” from the nuclear talks.