The State Department said Friday that there are no phone or email records available that might help officials figure out who ordered the editing of a 2013 department briefing video.
The department admitted Wednesday that the video was intentionally edited to remove a sensitive discussion about the Iran nuclear agreement. But State said no one knows who asked the female video technician to make those changes.
On Friday, spokesman Mark Toner said the department did try to see if phone records were used to call the video technician back in 2013. But he said the phone records aren’t kept for that long.
“The system is such that internal phone call records are only available for a 24-hour period,” he said. “So, those records, internal calls, would no longer be available. I believe they’re just simply gone.”
He also said there are no email records of the request either, and that the request was done entirely by phone.
“My understanding is … this was all done over the phone. There is no email record,” he said.
Toner answered questions for the third day in a row about the video editing scandal, which has angered Republicans in Congress who say the department needs to do much more to get to the bottom of who pushed for the editing to take place.
The part of the video that went missing included a reply from then-State spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who indicated that the government lies from time to time when necessary. Psaki, now the communications director, said she didn’t ask the video to be edited.
But on Friday, Psaki declined to say that government spokespeople should never lie to the public or the press.
Toner said State decided to say officially that it doesn’t believe Psaki was behind the incident, in light of press reports that he said “sullied” her reputation. But he said officials couldn’t say who else was not to blame.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., called for an inspector general investigation into the event, in particular to find out who was involved. State has said it is done investigating the issue.
Toner also said Secretary of State John Kerry was “very concerned” about the incident, and noted that State has put in place rules prohibiting people from editing videos without getting permission from a high-up official.
