"Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash -- green, green cash. Took it out of banks in Virginia, D.C., and Maryland. All the cash they had flew it by airplanes in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty."
You have heard some version of this claim for a decade. Obama gave pallets of cash to Iran. Obama paid off the mullahs. Obama funded terror with American money. It has been repeated so many times on so many cable news programs and social media feeds that it sounds like settled history.
It is not settled history. It is a claim. And like every claim published at Plain Citizen, it deserves to be measured against the actual record.
Here is the record.
In 1979, the government of Iran -- under the Shah, before the Islamic Revolution -- paid the United States $400 million for military equipment. Fighter jets. Spare parts. Defense hardware ordered and paid for through what was known as the Foreign Military Sales program.
The Islamic Revolution happened. The Shah fell. The new government of Iran was not going to get its fighter jets. The United States kept the $400 million.
Iran filed a claim at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal -- an international arbitration body established at The Hague specifically to resolve disputes between the two countries after the revolution. That claim sat in legal proceedings for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Nobody wanted to settle it. The political optics were terrible. But the legal obligation was real.
Trump's description of the payment -- green cash, pulled from banks in Virginia, DC and Maryland -- is partially accurate on the logistics. The money was assembled in cash and flown on cargo aircraft. That part is documented.
What that description leaves out is why cash was used and whose money it actually was.
The $400 million was Iranian money -- paid by Iran in 1979 for equipment that was never delivered. It had been sitting in a U.S. government account for 37 years. The $1.3 billion was interest on that original payment, calculated over those 37 years.
The reason the payment was made in cash and in foreign currency -- euros and Swiss francs, not dollars -- is that U.S. sanctions prohibit dollar transactions with Iran. The Obama administration could not wire dollars to an Iranian account. So they converted the settlement into foreign currency and transported it physically. The logistics were driven by sanctions law, not secrecy.
The Obama administration acknowledged the payment publicly and notified Congress. Secretary of State John Kerry said at the time: "We announced these payments in January, many months ago. They weren't a secret."
Trump has repeatedly framed the $1.7 billion as payment for the nuclear agreement -- money given to Iran in exchange for signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The record does not support that framing.
Treasury Department testimony before Congress identified the settlement as a resolution of the decades-old Foreign Military Sales dispute -- a separate legal matter that had been proceeding through The Hague tribunal independent of nuclear negotiations. The two were related in timing. They were not the same transaction.
"We do not pay ransom for hostages. We never have and we never will."
-- President Barack Obama, Pentagon news conference, August 2016Critics -- including Trump in 2016 and consistently since -- have argued that the timing of the initial $400 million payment, which coincided with the release of four American hostages, made it effectively a ransom regardless of the legal distinction. The Obama administration disputed that characterization. That dispute is a legitimate policy disagreement and Plain Citizen is not going to resolve it for you.
What Plain Citizen can tell you is that the characterization of the payment as cash "taken out of banks" to "buy loyalty" -- as if it were American taxpayer money handed over as a gift -- does not match the documented record. It was Iranian money. It was a legal settlement. It was publicly announced. And the interest had been accumulating since before Ronald Reagan was president.
Trump has also claimed repeatedly that the nuclear deal Obama negotiated would have led to Iran having a nuclear arsenal. The record on that is documented by sources that are not partisan.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015 by the United States, Iran, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, required Iran to reduce its enriched uranium stockpile by 97 percent, eliminate two-thirds of its centrifuges, dismantle a plutonium reactor, and submit to continuous international inspection of its nuclear facilities. These are not disputed facts. They are the terms of the agreement as signed and verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
When the United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018, Iran restarted its enrichment program. By the time the current conflict began, Iran had accumulated more enriched uranium than at any point before the deal was signed. That is also documented.
The $1.7 billion payment to Iran was real. The planes carrying cash were real. What was not accurate in Trump's description is the framing -- that it was American money, given as a gift, to buy loyalty. The government record shows it was Iranian money, returned after a 37-year legal dispute at an international tribunal, paid in foreign currency because sanctions law prohibited dollar transfers.
You can believe the Obama administration made a political mistake in the timing of the payment. You can believe the nuclear deal was a bad agreement. Those are legitimate positions that reasonable people hold. But the specific claim that Obama pulled cash from American banks to hand to Iran as a loyalty payment does not hold up against the documented record.
The documents are public. The Treasury testimony is in the congressional record. The State Department statements are archived. Plain Citizen read them. Now you know what they say.
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