A new report shows that the Obama administration is withholding from Congress details about how $1.3 billion in US taxpayer funds was delivered to Iran.
Fine. You don’t have to tell us. Just put it on a private server and we’ll get it from the Russians later.
Does this include the Iranian money that was seized during the hostage crisis (1978-Jan. 20, 1981)?
A: Yes, as far as I’ve read, it is the seized money, which is why Obama could bypass Congress… It wasn’t an appropriation, the administration claims, just a release of seized funds.
Will someone tell me why we went to the bother of electing a Republican Congress rather than a Democrat one? What’s difference, at this point, does it make?
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Covering Up the $1.3 Billion Payoff to Iran
By Seth Lipsky / New York Post / August 24, 2016
… to do so, the administration tapped a little-known account at the Treasury Department called the Judgment Fund. It is a special account used to pay out claims against the US government.
The details of how the administration did this, however, are being treated like a state secret….
The topic erupted at the State Department’s daily briefing on Tuesday and Wednesday. That was after Claudia Rosett reported in the New York Sun that the administration made 13 transfers of $99,999,999.99 each.
Those payments add up to 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion. They were made Jan. 19, two days after President Obama announced he’d cut a deal with the mullahs for $1.7 billion to avoid an adverse judgment at a court in The Hague.
We know, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that $400 million of that was made in foreign currency, loaded on wooden pallets and delivered in a special cargo plane and functioned as a ransom payment to the mullahs, who had been holding a group of Americans hostage.
The remaining $1.3 billion only started to come into focus when Rosett discovered the 13 transfers totaling $1.3 billion on a Treasury Department website related to the judgment fund.
She sees no other explanation than that the payments, which went from Treasury on behalf of the State Department, were to cover the Iran settlement.
…
This window into the shenanigans the administration is using to implement its deal isn’t just about whether the latest move is legal. No one has yet said it broke the law.
One of the principles of newspapering, though, is that the scandal is often not about what’s illegal but what’s legal. How can the administration tap the taxpayers for $1.3 billion without the say-so of Congress?
This is one of the most basic prohibitions in the Constitution. “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” is the way the parchment puts it.
The government maintains the judgment fund is legit. It calls it an “indefinite, permanent appropriation.” The idea is that Congress didn’t want to be bothered with having to pass a law for every nickel-and-dime settlement.
Could it have intended to authorize a blank check to send $1.3 billion to a regime that calls us the Great Satan and threatens to wipe Israel off the map? What Congress in its right mind would do such a thing?
What makes it so galling is that the administration knows that had the Iran payments been submitted to Congress for approval, they would’ve been turned down. Majorities in both houses were against the entire Iran nuclear deal — which is why it was treated as an executive, unilateral action and never submitted to the Senate for ratification, as a treaty would have to be.
via khaffir’s check or praypal. Sure it was risky, but as Obama always says, “You pays your money and you taqqiya chances.”
IF they explained the how we would then know the why. The two are intimately related.