On Wednesday evening, the Wall Street Journal published a story that would seem to have major implications for U.S.-Iranian relations and the “narrative” the Obama administration has been spinning to the America public via gullible journalists.
The Obama administration’s efforts to spin the U.S. media on Iran were detailed in an extensive New York Times profile of senior White House adviser and failed novelist Ben Rhodes, which described how “handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative” on Iran.
Neither Goldberg nor Rozen had much to say last night about the Journal‘s story on the planeload of cash we delivered just as four American prisoners were freed. They didn’t even bother to dismiss it as a non-story. But they did do a fair amount of nasty tweeting about Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Vox dot com has yet to explain what this new Iran story really means, but has written on a number of other interesting stories.
It would that appear that Ben Rhodes started blasting out some emails on Wednesday morning, around the same time that journalists started collectively tweeting about how the Journal’s story was no big deal and the public should have already known about it.
The Obama administration denies that the cash payments to Iran, to settle a long-standing debt over an arms deal that predates the Iranian revolution, had anything to do with the release of the four American prisoners. They have, however, acknowledged that the Iranian officials negotiating the prisoner exchange wanted the cash to in order to show a tangible benefit to Iran from the exchange.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton accused the Obama administration of paying a “ransom” for U.S. hostages.