It’s been just a couple of days since Donald Trump started getting confidential briefings over the objections of many.
As it turns out, the people objecting were dead right. At his Florida rally yesterday, Donald Trump spent a long time recounting the details of a very special video showing the absolutely non-secret transfer of non-ransom money to Iran.
Donald Trump on Wednesday described vivid details from a video he said he had watched earlier in the day of Iranian officials unloading cash from an airplane. The money was part of a payment, announced earlier this year, from the U.S. to Iran to settle a decades-old dispute over an incomplete weapons sale.
Trump described the video as being very clear, steady, and good quality. Trump also stated that the tape had been released to “embarrass America.”
“Over there, where that plane landed, top secret, they don’t have a lot of paparazzi, you know,” Trump said. “The paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there.” But “they have a perfect tape, obviously done by a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane. It’s a military tape. It’s a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady.”
The trouble is … there is no such tape. Not publicly anyway. So if Trump is describing an actual tape, it’s one that only he saw, possibly as part of a briefing.
However, Trump’s campaign is now providing another explanation.
As Fox News reported on the controversial transfer of $400 million in cash to Iran in January, it repeatedly played dark, grainy footage of shadowy figures walking off a small private plane with bags with hand. The video is often labeled as being from Jan. 17 in Geneva where three Americans first landed after being released from prison in Tehran.
Republican nominee Donald Trump watched this sort of footage, according to his spokeswoman, and concluded that it showed the controversial money transfer that was described in detail for the first time this week by the Wall Street Journal.
So either Donald Trump saw something that no one else was allowed to see, and immediately spilled it in public. Or Donald Trump saw grainy, hard to make out footage that was clearly labeled “Geneva, Switzerland” where three people had small bags in their hands, and this somehow turned it into “perfect angle” nice and clear footage of planes pouring money into Tehran.
Traitor. Or crazy? It seems to be a question that’s coming up a lot.