The State Department said Wednesday that it would investigate a censored 2013 briefing video about secret talks with Iran, reversing its claim last week that the investigation had hit a “dead end.”
“We’re going to continue to look at additional troves of information in an effort to find out, again, what happened,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. “[Secretary of State John Kerry] said he wants to dive deeper into this, look more into what happened, and try to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Initially, the State Department claimed that the deleted footage was a “glitch,” but last week said that part of the video was “deliberately” removed as the result of “a specific request.”
“A specific request was made to excise that portion of the briefing. We do not know who made the request to edit the video, or why it was made,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters, and underscored that there were no rules in place against the edit.
The next day, Toner said that the investigation “hit a dead end in terms of finding out more information.”
“The individual in question here does not remember who told him or her to carry out this order. It was a phone call that took place three years ago. We’re not going to question their memory but at this point, we believe that we’ve done the forensics,” he said.
However, the State Department changed course Wednesday, telling reporters that public pressure pushed them to continue the investigation.
“There are always other leads you can follow,” Toner said. “And so given the secretary’s strong interest, given Congress’s strong interest and given the media’s strong interest, we’ve decided to continue to look at that.”
In addition to media outrage over the deleted footage, House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz sent a letter to Secretary Kerry last week requesting greater detail concerning “the facts and circumstances surrounding the deletion of the video.”
The edited portion in question featured an exchange between Fox News reporter James Rosen and then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, in which Rosen asked Psaki whether her predecessor, Victoria Nuland, had lied months before when she denied that the United States and Iran had held “direct, secret, bilateral talks” in 2011.
“Is it the policy of the State Department, where the preservation or the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie in order to achieve that goal?” Rosen said in the video.
“James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that,” Psaki said. She has since denied any “knowledge” of the video censorship.
Rosen attempted to find the footage in response to a New York Times Magazine profile of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, which claimed that the Obama administration created a false narrative of the Iran deal in order to garner public support for it. While the administration suggested that talks with Iran got going after the “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani was elected in 2013, they had started months before, the piece claimed.