Ben Rhodes

Yeah, sure.

But somewhere in the neighborhood, $150 billion in frozen...

revenues right so they've been shipping oil out to places like china and india and just not able to access their own money yeah right so it was cast as like payments from us but in fact their capacity to access revenue for stuff they've already uh sold in a way now very importantly the famous 450 million dollars pallets of cash

was a separate part of the implementation of the deal where Iran released a number of Americans who were detained in Iran, including Jason Rezaian, who we both know, the Washington Post journalist.

In response to that, Iran had purchased some weapons from the United States before the Shah was ousted.

And we never delivered those weapons, unsurprisingly.

And various international courts had found that the United States owed Iran this amount of money.

And so essentially, we were closing different accounts with Iran.

And so Iran was paid for the weapons that they never received.

And this became one of the most insane freakouts from the Republican Party and the

FDD-verse to those who are nerds, when in fact it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Trump has already unfrozen in this war to sweeten the pot for the Iranians.

Yeah, so first of all, Iran also said, because Trump always makes this comment that they've never said they won't develop a nuclear weapon.

The preamble to the JCPOA was a permanent promise, a pledge, a commitment from the Iranians to never develop a nuclear weapon.

So there was a permanent prohibition on Iran ever developing a nuclear weapon or weaponizing their nuclear program.

People think about this as if they get enough fuel and suddenly they magically have a nuclear weapon.

No, they have to figure out how to put that on a warhead, right?

They have to weaponize their nuclear program.

That was permanent.

And there were a number of things in the deal that were permanent, including having to submit to IAEA inspections.

After about 10 years...