White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that the omission of two words from a transcript of one of his press briefings in no way compares to a growing scandal at the State Department over the deletion of a whole section of a video dealing with the Iran deal.
Asked why both the White House and State Department appear to have “scratched” sections of public briefings with reporters on the Iran deal, Earnest immediately took exception to the comparison.
“I don’t think it’s fair of you to say they were [both] scratched,” he said.
Instead, Earnest attributed the omission of two words he uttered denying that the administration had ever lied about the Iran deal from an official White House transcript of a May 6 press briefing to “a little cross talk.”
“Fortunately, your conscientious colleagues at ABC News, recognizing the discrepancy, asked me about it the next day, and I had an opportunity to explain exactly what had occurred, and that’s what I did,” he said.
On Friday night, ABC News posted a story about the White House omitting the words in question, and made the comparison to the State Department’s earlier decision to delete a whole section of a video of a press briefing dealing with a similar matter in 2013.
The exchange back in May started when Kevin Corke, a White House correspondent for Fox News, asked, “Can you state categorically that no senior official in this administration has ever lied publicly about any aspect of the Iran nuclear deal?”
“No, Kevin,” Earnest said in response.
That two-word response was not included in the May 6 transcript of the briefing, and the White House argued that the transcriber left those words out because they were inaudible.
Asked repeatedly about the rationale behind the decision to leave those two words out, Earnest rejected any comparison to the State Department incident.
“I think it’s important to note the distinction there in what was apparently an effort at the State Department to make a specific decision to remove a portion of the video,” Earnest told reporters. “That’s obviously something that I have said is inconsistent with what you’d expect — the whole goal of engaging in a public briefing.”
“The situation that you’re citing is related to a specific issue with a transcript that relates to two words,” he said. “I think you’d be hard pressed to make the case that there’s a link between the two.”
The reporter asked about the incident, and then asked Earnest whether he could clarify the issue by stating that the administration has never lied about the Iran deal.
Earnest said he would “just state the affirmative.”
“The administration has made a forceful and fact-based, accurate, truthful case about how the American people and the international community benefit from an international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Earnest went on to argue that reporters should be scrutinizing “false” statements from critics of the deal and ask those critics whether they were simply mistaken or were “lying.”
“There are individuals who suggested that somehow Iran would never agree to this agreement — they were wrong,” he said. “There are individuals who said we would not be able to verify that this agreement would be accurately implemented. They were wrong.
“There were individuals who suggested that somehow Iran would never follow through with the commitments that they had made in the context of the Iran deal. They were wrong.”
Earnest grew testy when the reporter, the Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau, wasn’t satisfied with that response.
Asked again whether that meant no individuals in the administration ever lied in making the case, Earnest asked Tau if he wanted “to present some evidence or just make a claim.”
He then “categorically” said that the administration made a “strong, fact-based truth case about the benefits of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
“What we said about the Iran deal and its benefits for the American people have come to pass — that’s something that the administration is quite proud of and will be an important part of the president’s legacy,” he said.
