The State Department has restored a video of a 2013 press briefing in which a spokeswoman seems to admit that the government may have lied about when the Iran nuclear talks began.
Monday night, the video was missing several minutes of an exchange between Fox News reporter James Rosen, and former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
In that exchange, Rosen asked if it’s ever the policy of the department to lie in order to preserve secrecy, and she seemed to agree.
“James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that,” Psaki replied.
That section of the video was suddenly discovered to be missing just days after Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times that the talks started in 2011, not in 2013 as the Obama administration first said.
That’s a key difference, as the administration has previously said the election of more moderate Iranian leaders in 2013 is what allowed the talks to happen.
State had no explanation for Fox News Monday night about how or when the section of the video was removed. However, Rosen’s report on Monday showed “white flash” in the video, which revealed the edit that removed several minutes of the video.
Reporter @JamesRosenFNC on the strange disappearance of a State Dept. presser https://t.co/ca5cv5zWd3
— Tom Rogan (@TomRtweets) May 9, 2016
The video that appears on State’s website Tuesday morning appears to be the original, and it matches the State Department’s own transcript of the 2013 event.
