The $1.7 billion cash payment that the White House recently sent to Iran suggests that Washington may have transferred to Tehran more than $33 billion in untraceable cash and precious metals since 2014, giving the Islamic Republic greater flexibility to launder money and finance terrorism.

In what many people must have seen as an incredibly naive assessment, President Barack Obama said last August in his speech at American University that 'our best analysts expect the bulk of this revenue to go into spending that improves the economy and benefits the lives of the Iranian people.'