The Biden administration has agreed to release $6 billion dollars to Iran as part of a prisoner swap, where 5 American prisoners in Iran were traded for 5 Iranian prisoners in the US. Prisoner swaps are not uncommon, but the release of the $6 billion dollars has created many concerns about how the money will be used. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The Biden administration has agreed to release $6 billion to Iran as part of a prisoner swap, where five American prisoners in Iran were traded for five Iranian prisoners in the US. Swaps aren’t uncommon, but the release of $6 billion has created concern. Let me give you the headline on this. Okay. $6 billion is gonna be used by Hezbollah. It’s gonna be used by the worst terrorist organizations in the world. Now, how do we know that? Because we’re handling the cases against Iran. We know, we’re actually handling the terrorism cases. Thousands of ’em, thousands of contractors, Americans, soldiers who’ve been killed right back, take the money, it all flows to Iran. 90% of the time flows directly to Iran, to where the military, their standing military is actually considered a terrorist organization. But Biden says, hey, here’s another $6 billion of your money that we could have taken and given to these people who have lost, lost their lives. The families that have lost their lives. They’ve lost legs, arms and what’s been done by Iran in this terrorism cycle, Biden seems to ignore that. $6 billion rather than going to these claimants is now going back to Iran so they can make cruise missiles or they can make whatever the hell they want. They can finance terrorism, can’t they?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And just so everybody understands where the $6 billion came from, this was money that South Korea was going to pay to Iran. They bought a bunch of fuel from Iran, were about to pay their $6 billion. But then the sanctions came in place. So they said, okay, we’re not gonna pay you your money, obviously, because we get in a lot of international trouble for doing that. So as part of this deal, which definitely seems like an unnecessary concession, Antony Blinken at the State Department says, okay, we’ll sign a waiver saying South Korea can give you back your $6 billion. You give us five people. So we’re paying $1.2 billion per person. And they get the five people back for free. It’s crazy.
Mike Papantonio: I wanna ask your opinion about something. Okay. I hear these freaky talking heads saying, well, it’s not taxpayer money, it’s their own money, but we’re giving it back.
Farron Cousins: It doesn’t matter.
Mike Papantonio: Doesn’t make any difference, does it?
Farron Cousins: No.
Mike Papantonio: We’re giving them $6 billion that they didn’t have that I know the law firms that are handling cases for these victims where we’ve taken, it’s this intricate, we’ve taken the best experts in the country. They can take the money all the way back to Iran when Iran sent the money to this place to be washed or that place to be washed. We can take the money all the way to the roadside bomb that killed somebody. That’s how easy it is to follow this. We know 90% of it is Iran. When this was developing, the people that were victims were outraged because that’s another $6 billion that we’ve given back to the people that killed their family member or that caused them to lose both legs. Look, it’s Hezbollah, it’s al Haq. They’re all centered in Iran. As a matter of fact, Iran right now is the biggest supplier for terrorism money in the sub-Sahara. There’s no bigger supplier. The sub-Sahara, Africa. This is the country that gives them all, everything they need to blow the hell out of anybody they want. We’re gonna see it back in the US. This $6 billion, buddy, chicken’s gonna come home to roost on this. Biden was told, Blinken was told, don’t do this. Did it anyway.
Farron Cousins: And for the people who wanna say, well, we’re just giving them their money back. Why? I mean, you need to stop and think for a second why we withheld it from them in the first place. And this is exactly why. We could have made, prisoner swaps happen all the time. You don’t have to give up the farm in order to get people back. Usually in a situation like this, we had five of yours, you’ve got five of ours.
Mike Papantonio: Trade off.
Farron Cousins: Let’s just do a trade.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We’re not gonna give you $6 billion that you can use against us in your terrorism network. And that’s exactly what happened here. And Blinken was told again and again by the best experts on the planet, who by the way, we know because some of them are working with us in the cases. Right. They said, don’t do this. This is a big mistake and you’re taking money away from the people who should be compensated for the terrorism that was directly related to Iran.
