White House press secretary Josh Earnest said a decision at the State Department to selectively edit out a portion of the press briefing dealing with the Iran nuclear deal would never happen on his watch.
“I feel quite confident in saying that no one would make a decision like that about a briefing that I was involved in without telling me,” Earnest said to a group of reporters traveling with the president back from Colorado Thursday evening. He also noted that the White House press shop benefits from having a smaller press operation than the State Department.
Earnest went on to say that he believes that everyone who works on his staff understands that “preserving the integrity of those kinds of transcripts and those videos is really important.”
“So it’s not uncommon, those of you who are close readers of transcripts that are used at the White House, for clarifications to be issued,” he said. “Those are always clearly marked. That’s an important principle.”
Two former State Department spokeswoman over the last 48 hours have denied any responsibility or knowledge of who pushed to delete a section of a State Department press briefing video in 2013.
White House Communications Director Jen Psaki and Marie Harf, a top communications adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, have both denied any involvement or knowledge of the purposeful decision to edit a portion of the briefing video dealing with the timing of when negotiations began with the Iran deal.
Asked about the decision by someone in the State Department’s public affairs office to cut out a portion of the briefing, Earnest acknowledged that the situation is “unusual, to say the least.”
Such a decision, he said, is “inconsistent with the whole purpose of a public briefing.”
Still, Earnest gave the State Department credit for releasing the full transcript of the briefing and said full video footage that was not altered of the same briefing has been available through the Department of Defense.
“What the State Department has done is clarify exactly what procedures should be followed, and they expressed a lot of confidence that something like this would never happen again,” he said.
