A private transcription service popular inside the Washington beltway has amended its transcript of an early May press briefing to correct an error related to the Iran nuclear agreement, an error that White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said the White House won’t fix in its own transcript.
Federal News Service, a transcription service owned by CQ-Roll Call, acknowledged a mistake in its transcription of the May 9 press briefing, and the company has since corrected it.
That transcript has given the White House press office headaches because its own official version omitted a two-word response from Earnest, and several media outlets have questioned why the words were left out and why the White House is refusing to fix it.
The exchange in question came when Fox News’ Kevin Corke asked Earnest, “Can you state categorically that no senior official in this administration has ever lied publicly about any aspect of the Iran deal?”
“No, Kevin,” Earnest said in response.
That two-word response was not included in the May 9 White House transcript of the briefing. Earnest has argued that the transcriber left those words out because they were inaudible.
Other reporters, including Fox News’ James Rosen, have argued that the audio is clear, and have asked why the White House has insisted that the portion is inaudible.
David Ellis, the chief content officer for CQ-Roll, said the FNS transcriber also had trouble hearing that section and transcribed Earnest’s response as “Yes” instead of “No, Kevin.”
If there’s ever a question about what the transcriber is hearing, FNS instructs its transcribers to use the words “inaudible,” and that should have been done in this instance and will be done from now on, Ellis told the Washington Examiner.
The fixed FNS transcript now reads, “No, Kevin,” the accurate version of Earnest’s response, according to several media reports and a YouTube video of the press briefing, which has a clearly audible version of the response.
The White House has so far refused to fix its official transcript from the briefing – even when faced with other versions of the video showing a clear “No, Kevin,” response from Earnest.
“No,” Earnest said earlier this week when asked if he would amend the transcript.
It was the second day in a row in which Earnest grew testy under questioning about the transcript. Fox’s Rosen also pushed the press secretary on why he had attributed the reason for the omission to a lot of “cross talk,” when other reporters, including ABC News, Bloomberg and himself, felt like his response was very clear without any cross talk.
“I don’t write the transcripts,” Earnest said, referring to the staff that produces them.
“But you care about the quality of them,” Rosen interjected.
“Of course I do, James,” he said.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment about the error in the FNS transcript and the company’s decision to amend it.
The White House transcript omission flap comes on the heels of a growing controversy over the State Department’s decision to delete a section of a press briefing dealing with a similar topic – whether the administration ever lied about the Iran deal.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has asked the White House for all documents in its possession that might explain how the transcript omitted a key answer about the Iran nuclear agreement.
Chaffetz asked White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough if the omission was “intentional” and asked for any documents that might explain whether someone edited it out, and who might have made such a decision.
In a similar letter to the State Department, Chaffetz asked for documents pertaining to a decision to edit a press briefing video to exclude a discussion about the Iran deal.
