The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell story late Tuesday night which suggests an outrageous, secret cash for hostages arrangement engineered by the Obama Administration with the Mullahs of Iran:

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17 — without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

The report goes on to relay non-denial denials from unnamed “senior officials” who claim the timing of the secret, cash delivery was merely coincidental and there was no quid pro quo with the Iranian government guaranteeing the release of the American prisoners once the cash was delivered. It just so happens that once the cash was delivered, the prisoners were released.

On the morning of Jan. 17, Iran released the four Americans: Three of them boarded a Swiss Air Force jet and flew off to Geneva, with the fourth returning to the U.S. on his own. In return, the U.S. freed seven Iranian citizens and dropped extradition requests for 14 others.

U.S. and European officials wouldn’t disclose exactly when the plane carrying the $400 million landed in Iran. But a report by an Iranian news site close to the Revolutionary Guard, the Tasnim agency, said the cash arrived in Tehran’s Mehrabad airport on the same day the Americans departed.

State Department spokesman Admiral John Kirby said in a statement:

“The negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim… were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home. … Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR,) an outspoken critic of the administration’s Iran policies called the payments “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.” He went on to say, “this break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures.”

Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said in a statement: “Paying ransom to kidnappers puts Americans even more at risk. While Americans were relieved by Iran’s overdue release of illegally imprisoned American hostages, the White House’s policy of appeasement has led Iran to illegally seize more American hostages.”

The Wall Street Journal also notes that since the cash payment to the Iranian terror regime the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Americans as well as Persians from France, Canada and the U.K. who were in Iran.

When the Reagan Administration facilitated the sale of arms to Iran in a deal that President Reagan later conceded had “deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages,” the Democrat-majority House led a full investigation and there were calls for impeachment from the media.

How will the sycophants in the mainstream media and the cowards in the Republican-led congress respond to this obvious ransom deal engineered by Obama?

Well, here’s what the homepage of Fox News looks like as of 6AM Wednesday:

And here’s the homepage at CNN at the same time:

If there’s any integrity or serious journalism left at America’s major news outlets, this story should blow up today. But, let’s not forget what Ben Rhodes, the man who engineered the Obama policy on Iran, has said about the media and how this administration manipulates them:

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”..

Will the “know-nothing” media fall in line again?