Donald Trump Made Up Story About Seeing Iran Plane Video, Campaign Admits

An innocuous story became a huge headline earlier this week after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed to have seen a “top secret” video, but the candidate and the campaign now say Trump saw no such video.

On Wednesday, after The Wall Street Journal reported that the release of four American prisoners coincided with a $400 million cash payment to Iran, Trump, while campaigning in Florida, claimed to have seen video of a cargo plane being unloaded with the cash.

“”Iran — I don’t think you’ve heard this anywhere but here — Iran provided all of that footage, the tape of taking that money off that airplane, right? $400 million in cash. How does a president do that? How do you do that?”

Trump attempted to blame the administration, and by extension his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, for a ransom payment for the prisoners, calling Clinton a “liar.”

Trump continued:

“Now here’s the amazing thing. Over there where that plane landed, top secret, they don’t have a lot of paparazzi, you know the paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there, right, and they have a perfect tape done by obviously a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane, right. That means in order to embarrass us further Iran sent us the tapes, right. It’s a military tape. It’s a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady. Nobody getting nervous because they are going to be shot, because they are shooting a picture of money pouring off of plane.” The Iranians, Trump said, released the video “so that we will be embarrassed.”

Ironically, Trump telling his audience about his opponent’s dishonesty blew up when it was revealed the $400 million payment had nothing to do with the four prisoners who were released, but also that there never was a video of cash being unloaded from a plane.

According to Trump’s campaign, the video he was referring to was “b-roll footage” shown on Fox News from Geneva, Switzerland when the hostages were released back in January. When the Washington Post asked the campaign why Trump thought it was a money transfer recorded and leaked by the Iranian government, they did not respond. Trump, for his part, admitted he did not see a plane carrying $400 million in cash and it was the Geneva, Switzerland video.

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

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2016

As widely reported back in January, the $400 million payment is the first in many installments the U.S. will pay Iran over a “decades-old dispute stemming from a failed arms deal before Iran’s last monarch was deposed in 1979,” ABC News reported. The U.S. will pay the Middle East nation a total of $1.7 billion.

As potentially one of the most powerful people in the world, we can’t see anything going wrong with Trump making up stories about international incidents.