Almost exactly one month before the Associated Press confirmed the United States government would grant a sanctions waiver to allow Iran to access $6 billion as ransom for five American hostages, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby insisted “there’s not going to be sanctions relief” for Iran as part of the deal.
Kirby made his remarks on August 10 on CNN, which was interested in the subject because GOP presidential candidate and former vice president Mike Pence had just declared, “Biden has authorized the largest ransom payment in American history to the mullahs in Tehran.”
Pence had made that pronouncement because the administration of left-wing President Joe Biden was conducting a bizarre slow rollout of the Iran hostage deal. The administration saw no need to level with the American public or answer tough questions about its negotiations. Instead, unnamed officials were dispatched to friendly media outlets to murmur about the terms of the deal.
The only on-the-record statement about the deal offered by Biden officials was that four of the five American hostages had been moved from Iran’s notoriously brutal prisons to more comfortable house arrest, where the fifth prisoner already awaited them.
Kirby was furious at Pence for describing the payoff to Iran as “ransom.”
“He’s wrong, just plain and simple. Look, while I can’t tell you everything that we’re doing and everything that this is, I can certainly tell you what it’s not. And there’s not going to be a ransom payment. There’s not going to be sanctions relief,” Kirby told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Kirby then tried the head-spinning argument that Iran’s big score should not be considered a “ransom” unless it was paid with greenbacks straight from the U.S. Treasury:
There [are] no U.S. taxpayer dollars that are going to be applied to getting these Americans home. And this $6 billion, without getting into the details of the negotiations, I think there’s a little confusion about what this account is all about. This is part of a system of accounts that were set up in the previous administration that allowed some countries to import Iranian goods, non-sanctionable goods, and that the Iranians could pull on those accounts, those payments, through a special system only used for humanitarian purposes. And that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s a pre-existing account that was set up in the previous administration, which they allowed other countries to set up, that has not been made accessible to the Iranians. They’d be able to have some access to it, but only for humanitarian purposes.
“You say it’s not American taxpayer dollars, and that’s accurate; still, it does seem like we are giving the Iranians something, Tapper said. “And certainly, I could understand why the common man or woman out there might say, ‘That’s a ransom payment… I’m glad these Americans are getting home, but that’s a ransom payment,'” he continued.
Kirby took a deep breath and exhaled an impressive cloud of pettifog:
Well, a couple of things here: First of all, negotiations are about giving and taking, and there was no universe in which we were going to get these five Americans home without some bartering, some compromising with the Iranians. And that bargaining is ongoing right now. So, again, I don’t want to get too far ahead of what it’s going to actually look like, the terms — the scope of the negotiation and the deal. But on this ransom, this is not a ransom.
And it’s important to remember that the account from which money could be accessed by the Iranians is an account set up in the previous administration that allowed other countries to import non-sanctionable goods. It’s not something that the Biden administration created, but it’s a series of accounts that Iran has pulled on before. They haven’t been able to pull on one account, and what we’re talking about is the possibility of making that one account that has been in existence for several years more accessible to the Iranians. But it would be, again, under the same level of limits. They could only pull from that account for humanitarian purposes, and there is an oversight mechanism that’s already built into that process. So, it’s not ransom, and again, no U.S. taxpayer dollars involved here.
On September 11 – a mind-blowing choice of date to reveal a massive payoff to the world’s worst state sponsors of terrorism – the Biden administration finally admitted that Iran would indeed be getting its $6 billion without any United States sanctions restrictions, apparently in a notification sent to Congress that day.
The notification reportedly stressed that the money will supposedly be supervised by Qatar, which will only allow Iran to make withdrawals for the purchase of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. Apparently, the White House hopes people will forget that money is fungible, and every billion dollars the Iranian regime does not have to spend on food is a billion dollars it can spend on terrorism.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was not even willing to give the Biden team a full 24 hours to spin its defeat. On Tuesday, Raisi said his regime intends to spend the loot “wherever we need it.”
“This money belongs to the Iranian people, the Iranian government, so the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide what to do with this money,” Raisi asserted to NBC News.
“Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people needs, so this money will be budgeted for those needs, and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government,” he said.