Obama "Cash For Iran Was Not Ransom Money", Clinton Leads Trump In Polls, Did Melania Follow Immigration Rules?

President Barack Obama on Thursday dismissed suggestions a $400 million payment to Iran amounted to a ransom paid in return for the release of American hostages.

Confirming the US offered the payment in cash, Obama nevertheless downplayed the delivery's significance, saying it was not a "nefarious" deal.
And he pushed back on Republican attacks charging that the White House completed the transaction as part of the prisoner swap. The line of argument was intensified by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump just moments before the President's comments, though he also complicated his message by referring to having seen a video of the transfer whose existence others have doubted.

Obama on Thursday sharply defended the decision to send palettes of cash to Iran, however.
"We do not pay ransom. We didn't here, and we won't in the future," Obama said after reports emerged that the United States delivered palettes of cash to Tehran on the same day the prisoners were freed.
"Those families know we have a policy that we don't pay ransom," Obama said. "And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we're looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them we don't pay ransom, defies logic."

Obama downplayed the story, saying he had been open about the payment at the time it was agreed upon.
"We announced these payments in January. Many months ago. They were not a secret," Obama said during a news conference at the Pentagon. "It wasn't a secret. We were completely open with everybody about it."

Meanwhile, Trump's decision to focus on the purported video risked diverting attention from his wider attacks on Iran policy, which have the potential to put the Obama administration and his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in a tough political spot.

Hillary Clinton has widened her lead over Donald Trump in a pair of new national polls published on Thursday, as the Republican nominee ends one of the worst weeks of his campaign.

Clinton opened up a 15-point margin in the McClatchy-Marist survey, 48% to 33%, which was conducted as Trump feuded publicly first with the Muslim parents of a slain American war hero and then House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the GOP's most popular and powerful figures.

Last month, Clinton held a narrow 3-point advantage, 42%-39% in a McClatchy-Marist poll.

In an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton's edge is 9 points (47% to 38%), cushioning what was a 5-point advantage in early July. A CNN/ORC poll this week showed Clinton with a similar 9-point edge over Trump nationally.

The added option of third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson had little effect on the head-to-head spreads. In the McClatchy-Marist poll, Clinton's lead shrunk by only 1 point, while she retained an identical 9-point lead in the NBC-WSJ survey.