Justice Dept. objected to cash payment to Iran: report

Senior officials from the Department of Justice objected to sending a plane full of cash to Iran but were overruled by the State Department, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday night. 

{mosads}The cash was airlifted to Iran at the same time four American prisoners were released and also coincided with the formal implementation of the Iran nuclear deal.

The payment, which the administration announced at the time, was the first part of a $1.7 billion settlement to resolve a dispute surrounding an arms deal signed just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But the administration did not disclose then that the first payment was $400 million in cash, the WSJ reported Tuesday. 

And it said Wednesday that the timing and form of the payment raised concerns at the Justice Department. 

“People knew what it was going to look like, and there was concern the Iranians probably did consider it a ransom payment,’’ one source told the paper. 

The DOJ officials’ concerns show that members of the Obama administration itself feared the optics of pallets of cash being flown to Iran, worrying it could send the wrong signal about U.S. policy regarding hostages, which is not to pay ransoms. 

Top Republicans in Congress blasted the Obama administration on Wednesday. 

“If true, this report confirms our longstanding suspicion that the administration paid a ransom in exchange for Americans unjustly detained in Iran,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement. 

And Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent much of his day on the campaign trail attacking the president on the issue. 

His campaign released a statement Wednesday night from senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, saying, “This administration has embarassed our country as no administration has before, going so far as to fund Islamic terror through cash payments to Iran. Nothing less than a full investigation is required, and if email-destroying Hillary Clinton can’t break from Obama on this then she is even more corrupt than anyone imagined.”  

“It looks like we paid $400 million for the hostages, such an unbelievably bad precedent by Obama,” Trump said earlier at a campaign rally. “Two more have been kidnapped since then, when is it going to end? What we are doing is insane.”

Updated 8:36 p.m.