Barack Obama has claimed the U.S. cannot send wire payments to Iran, justifying his controversial $400 million cash payment in January, but a Treasury Department spokesman said two wire payments were made in the past 14 months, according to a Politico report.
The U.S. wired $848,000 to Iran in July 2015 and around $9 million in April 2016, the spokesman told Politico. Those payments "settled a claim over architectural drawings and fossils" and "to remove 32 metric tons of its heavy water, which is used to produce plutonium and can aid in the making of nuclear weapons," according to the report.
The Obama Administration still maintains the U.S. does not have "a direct banking relationship with Iran, which means that we cannot wire money directly to Iran," despite the details of the payments above. Lawmakers are worried about the dangers of the cash payment because it is difficult to track how that money would be spent, potentially winding up funding terrorism or other anti-American Iran initiatives.
"Oh, I don’t have any question that Iran wants the money in cash because they wanted it faster than what a wire transfer would be and it’s fungible," Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who discovered aforementioned wide payments in briefs with Obama administration officials, told Politico on Thursday. "They announced pretty quickly afterward that they were expanding their defense and their military budget by $1.7 billion dollars, an exact amount that we had just sent over to them. So I don’t think that was accidental.
"But when you give cash, we can’t track. Did that go to Hezbollah? Did that go to the Russians? Did that go to the coup in Yemen? There’s no way to be able to track that."
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