A government spokesman said Wednesday that the State Department purposefully removed part of a 2013 video about secret negotiations with Iran.
“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 said. “To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have in place any rules governing this type of action.”
Kirby said the request had been “made over the phone,” and that the recipient of the call did not remember who made the request.
“The recipient of the call doesn’t remember anything other than that the caller, the individual who called this technician, was passing on a request from someone else in the Public Affairs Bureau,” he said.
While Kirby said that he was “not aware of any other instance” of the State Department editing its briefings, he could not rule out that it had not happened before.
“I can’t tell you with great certainty … that it never happened before,” Kirby said.
Initially, the State Department claimed that the edit had been a “glitch,” and restored the video.
The clipped section of the briefing featured Fox News reporter James Rosen asking then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki whether the Obama administration had lied about having secret talks with Iran in 2011 – a claim that Psaki did not deny, but that her predecessor, Victoria Nuland, had denied months before.
“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.
Rosen attempted to track down the briefing footage after a New York Times Magazine profile of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes claimed that the Obama administration “largely manufactured” a narrative for the Iran deal in order to garner support for it.
Though “the most meaningful part” of talks with Iran began in “mid-2012,” the administration portrayed the negotiation as beginning in 2013, with the election of “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani, according to the piece.
