White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday refused to amend a transcript of a White House briefing in which two words of his were omitted when discussing the Iran deal, even after several news outlets were able to clearly identify the missing words.
The transcript in question was created in May, after 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 transcript of the briefing, and Earnest has argued that the transcriber left those words out because they were inaudible.
Fox News’ James Rosen argued Tuesday that the audio is clear, and asked why the White House is insisting that portion of the audio is inaudible.
“I don’t know,” Earnest replied.
Rosen went on to chide Josh for “standing there at the podium” and “maintaining that you did not say that which it is clearly discernible you said.” But the clearly annoyed Earnest refused to change his position, and rejected Rosen’s idea of trying to review the video again to see if the transcript of the briefing should be amended.
“No,” Earnest said, when asked if he would.
It was the second day in a row in which Earnest grew testy under questioning about the transcript. Rosen also pushed the press secretary on why Earnest 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.
Earnest mostly repeated a response he used Monday to similar questions. Instead of stating that the administration never lied about anything related to the Iran deal or the negotiations surrounding it, he stated that the senior officials had “worked very hard” to make a “forceful, fact-based” and “truthful” case for the Iran deal.
Then he tried to focus on GOP critics of the deal and the arguments they made against the agreement that he said didn’t pan out.
“The truth is there are a lot of Republicans who opposed the deal who said a whole bunch of things about the Iran deal that were wrong,” he said. “I don’t know if they were mistaken, I don’t know if they were naive, I don’t know if they were poorly briefed, I don’t know if they were lying. They were wrong. I leave it to them to defend exactly the position that they have taken.”
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 and the negotiations surrounding it.
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.
