Obama Didn’t Give Iran ‘150 Billion in Cash’

 https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/obama-didnt-give-iran-150-billion-in-cash/

A viral meme distorts the facts about the Iran nuclear agreement. The deal, approved by six countries and the European Union, gave Iran access to its own frozen assets.

As a candidate during the 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump criticized the international agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons’ program — formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — that had been adopted the year before. He suggested that the U.S. had returned $150 billion to Iran as part of the deal.

That’s not true. We’ve written about this issue before. PolitiFact and the Washington Post have, too.

But Trump has repeated the claim as recently as December, when he tweeted: “The Democrats and President Obama gave Iran 150 Billion Dollars and got nothing, but they can’t give 5 Billion Dollars for National Security and a Wall?”

The meme, which has been shared 149,000 times on Facebook, mentions the recent lawsuit brought against the Trump administration by 16 states to block the national emergency. The meme says: “So, when Obama bypassed the Congress while giving Iran 150 billion in cash, how many States had sued him?”

The nuclear agreement included China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, so Obama didn’t carry out any part of it on his own. The deal did lift some sanctions, which lifted a freeze on Iran’s assets that were held largely in foreign, not U.S., banks. And, to be clear, the money that was unfrozen belonged to Iran. It had only been made inaccessible by sanctions aimed at crippling the country’s nuclear program.