Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”

Whose confidentiality? The mullahs’? That of the intermediaries the president used? Whose privacy takes precedence over our right to know how Obama funneled our money to our enemies?

The closest thing to an answer we have to the latest round of questions comes courtesy of the perseverance of the investigative journalist Claudia Rosett. (You weren’t expecting the Republican Congress to be minding the purse, were you?)

Recall that we have been asking about the $1.3 billion payment since the first revelations about this sordid affair. After all, if, as Obama and his toadies maintain, the payment is totally on the up and up — just a routine legal settlement involving Iran’s own money — then why won’t they answer basic questions about it?

Why are such matters as the administration’s process in tapping a congressionally appropriated funding source for the settlement — a settlement Congress did not approve and seems to be in the dark about paying for — being treated as if they were state secrets so sensitive you’d need have a Clinton.mail account (or be a Russian hacker of a Clinton.mail account) to see them?

With the administration taking the Fifth, it was left to Claudia to crawl through Leviathan’s catacombs. In her New York Sun report on Monday, we learned that she hit pay dirt: stumbling upon a bizarre string of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — yes, all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.” The transfers were made — to whom, it is not said — on January 19, just two days after the administration announced it had reached the $1.7 billion settlement with Iran. They aggregate to just 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion, the same amount the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution.

So, stacked atop of the pallets of $400 million in foreign cash that Obama arranged to shuttle from Geneva to Tehran as ransom (or, as the administration prefers, “leverage”) for the release of American hostages — via an unmarked cargo plane belonging to Iran Air, a terrorist arm of the mullahs’ terrorist coordinator, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — we now have a second whopping money transfer that (a) violates federal criminal laws against providing things of value to Iran and (b) looks like it was conceived by Nicky Barnes.

While “the most transparent administration in history” continues to insist that this transaction is completely legit, Claudia could not find the 13 transfers of $99,999,999.99 by searching for “Iran” listings in the judgment fund.

Acknowledgment of payments to Iran is nowhere to be found. Instead, she happened upon this $1.3 billion (minus the 13 cents) by locating cases in which the State Department was a party. And with that, another intriguing wrinkle emerged: a 14th unexplained transfer by Treasury, on State’s behalf, in the amount of $10 million — bringing the total to $1.31 billion.

How is it that, in what is purportedly a completely aboveboard legal case, we are not permitted to know how our own money was transferred to the jihadist plaintiff?

Is that extra $10 million a sweetener for someone in this deal? Who knows . . . the administration won’t tell us. It won’t even confirm that the string of transfers was for Iran, though that appears undeniable: Not only does the amount fit; the administration has grudgingly conceded in response to inquiries from Representatives Ed Royce (R., Calif.) and Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) that it got the money to pay Iran from the judgment fund.

You might think that members of Congress, the branch of government that is supposed to approve all spending by the federal government, would not have to ask where the executive branch got money to pay a government obligation. But in Obama’s eccentric interpretation of the Constitution, there are apparently special Iran clauses. So in this instance, lawmakers have to ask because this is not a bill they ever agreed to pay; and Obama had to try to sneak it by them because he knows that, had he asked for more piles of money — in addition to the tens of billions in sanctions relief — to bestow on an incorrigible jihadist enemy of the United States, Congress would have said “No.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/iran-ransom-payment-obama-administration-transfer-funds-unconstitutional/