The Obama administration wired almost one million dollars to an Iranian bank account in Europe last July, months before making a separate $1.7 billion payment to Iran that officials say had to be made in cash. The administration also withheld some details of the wire payment from Congress and misstated other details to journalists, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has confirmed.
President Obama said in August that the $1.7 billion payment, which was delivered in January and February around the time that Iran released several American prisoners, had to be paid in cash because “we do not have a banking relationship with Iran” and “we could not wire the money.”
A State Department official confirmed to TWS this week that in the July before the cash payment was made, the U.S. wired roughly $850,000 “to an account of the Iranian Center for International Legal
Affairs, or CILA, in the Netherlands.” The official said the money was linked to a legal judgment and described CILA as “the Iranian office responsible for representing Iran before the [Iran-United States Claims] Tribunal.”
TWS reported this month that the administration also wired an $8.6 million dollar payment to Iran in April 2016, months after the cash payment, for 32 tons of heavy water. Heavy water is a material used in the production of weapons-grade plutonium.
Details of the July wire transfer and its relation to the later $1.7 billion cash payment had been misstated or remained undisclosed, according to administration officials, lawmakers, and experts who spoke to TWS.
The Treasury Department told journalists earlier this month that the July 2015 wire payment was for fossils and architectural drawings. In the days that followed, State Department officials told TWS that there was “possibly some misinformation” surrounding the July payment, and later confirmed that the wire payment was not for antiquities.
Oklahoma senator James Lankford, who this month received briefings from Treasury and State Department officials and requested details from the White House about the $1.7 billion cash transfer, denounced the administration for not being upfront about the payments.
“Senator Lankford is extremely disappointed that the Obama administration has not been transparent about payments to Iran,” Lankford’s spokesman, DJ Jordan, told TWS. “The American people deserve to know where their tax money is going to, especially if it’s going to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”
A source who works on the issue with Congressional offices from both parties told TWS that the administration’s statements reflect a policy of deliberately hiding details about payments to Iran.
“The more people know about each individual payment, the more the administration’s defenses about all of its payments to Iran fall apart,” the source said. “They’ve made deliberate decisions to rush payments to Iran on a range of issues, including sometimes in cash.”
“So they’re deliberately keeping details from journalists and Congress. There’s still no way to know how much money they’ve transferred, or how many times, or for what, or if it was in cash,” the source added.
Critics of the $1.7 billion payment claim that the money was for ransom, and that the administration caved to Iranian demands for cash, which they say can be more easily used for terrorism.
The administration has denied both charges, calling the initial $400 million installment, sent to Iran in January, “leverage.”
The administration may also have sent Iran as much as $33.6 billion in cash or precious metals prior to the $1.7 billion payment, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.
