I was wrong, Trump admits

Donald Trump acknowledged Friday he was wrong in claiming to have seen secret Iranian footage of $400 million in cash being delivered to Tehran as payment for the release of US prisoners.

Trump raised eyebrows this week when he made that assertion and gave many details of what he said he saw in the film.

“Remember this: Iran — I don’t think you heard this anywhere but here — Iran provided all of that footage, the tape of taking that money off the airplane,” Trump said Wednesday at a rally in Florida. “Right?”

But that widely viewed footage is believed instead to show the moment in January when three of five American prisoners freed by Iran get off a plane in Geneva.

In a tweet Friday, Trump said this is indeed what he saw. It is rare for the free-wheeling Republican presidential nominee — known for making provocative claims — to admit making a mistake.

“The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!” Trump wrote.

The story of the seemingly cloak and dagger money transfer in an unmarked plane was broken this week by the Wall Street Journal.

In January, five American prisoners were released as Washington granted clemency to seven Iranians and withdrew arrest warrants for 14 others.

Soon thereafter, the United States helped airlift $400 million worth of Swiss francs and euros to Iran.

But President Barack Obama says the payment was not ransom for the release of US prisoners.

The White House has said it was returning cash from a 1970s Iranian military order that was not fulfilled because of the Islamic Revolution.

Comments

FG borrows N3.38bn To Aid Potato Production in Plateau

The Federal Executive Council (FEC) wednesday approved N3.38 billion to boost the production of potatoes in Plateau State. The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, who made the disclosure said the money would be borrowed from Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) with one per cent interest rate and 25 years moratorium. The minister who said the loan was not fresh, explained that it had previously been cancelled by the federal government with the intention to make a fresh request for the loan on behalf of Plateau State which she said was responsible for 95 per cent of potato production in the country. According to her, following ADB’s comprehensive programme on potato production in Plateau State, 100,000 families and 17 local government areas of Plateau State would benefit from the loan while 60,000 jobs would be created by the initiative. “My approval was on behalf of Plateau State to support the potato value chain. There is a loan that we had previously cancelled from ...

Much ado about the foreign reserves - Nonso Obikili

I have received a lot of questions about the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) foreign reserves recently. The CBN has of course been touting the reserves growing from a low of about $24bn to the approximately $42bn it is now. The questions typically centre around why we are keeping so much in reserve when the economy is struggling, and we have poor infrastructure? Why don’t we use the reserves to reduce the poverty that is rampant? The question typically betrays a little bit of misunderstanding over what the foreign reserves are and how the entire thing works. Hopefully, after reading this we will have a better understanding of what it is and what it can and can’t be used for. First, what is the “Foreign Reserves?” It is the amount of foreign exchange that the central bank has at its disposal at any point in time. Some of this is in cash and some in other liquid assets, that is assets that can quickly be turned to cash. Some of this is in US dollars but sometimes it’s in other c...

The Cambridge Analytica files: the story so far

What are the allegations against Cambridge Analytica? The data analytics firm used personal information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that could target US voters with personalised political advertisements based on their psychological profile, according to Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica contractor who helped build the algorithm. Employees of Cambridge Analytica, including the suspended CEO Alexander Nix, were also filmed boasting of using manufactured sex scandals, fake news and dirty tricks to swing elections around the world. How is Facebook involved in the scandal? The social media company has received a number of warnings about its data security policies in recent years and had known about the Cambridge Analytica data breach since 2015, but only suspended the firm and the Cambridge university researcher who harvested user data from Facebook earlier this month. A former Facebook manager has warned tha...

ATTENCAO

Search This Blog