National Public Radio has revised its earlier claim that it never heard from an anti-Iran deal congressman who said he tried last year to serve as a counterweight to all the pro-nuclear agreement lawmakers featured on the publicly funded news network.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, said he lobbied NPR in 2015 to discuss the White House’s controversial nuclear treaty with Iran. However, the lawmaker added, the news group ignored his requests, even as it accepted a grant of $100,000 from a pro-nuclear agreement White House surrogate.
NPR’s questionable relationship with the Ploughshares Fund, a non-proliferation advocacy group, was uncovered last week by the Associated Press.
Pompeo told the AP he definitely requested interviews with NPR last year, and explained he wanted to serve as a counterweight to pro-nuclear deal guests like Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
A spokesperson for the publicly funded radio news group said last week they had no record of the congressman’s requests. However, NPR is now correcting itself, and conceded this week that the congressman did, in fact, contact them in 2015 to talk about the nuclear pact.
The about-face comes on the heels of the Washington Free Beacon reporting Monday that it reviewed emails confirming Pompeo’s office had spoken with the network’s producers.
An NPR spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner’s media desk the congressman was not interviewed last year due to scheduling conflicts.
“Rep. Pompeo was booked to discuss the Iran deal in August 2015, but the interview did not take place, as often happens in news organizations interviews and schedules get shuffled around,” she said Monday.
“That week, NPR interviewed other members of Congress with diverse views on the deal. We updated the response we gave to the AP as soon as we learned there was, in fact, a record of Rep. Pompeo being contacted,” she added.
The original AP story has not been updated to reflect that NPR confirmed it was in contact with the congressman.
“In the past year, other prominent Republican officials have appeared on our newsmagazines to discuss the Iran deal or were the focus of related stories about economic sanctions, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.; Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill.; and Rep. Pet Sessions, R-Texas, among others,” NPR’s spokeswoman said.
The congressman, however, said there’s more to the story than NPR is willing to admit.
“The pieces are coming together on President Obama’s machinations in selling the Iran deal. As Obama administration officials admit to misrepresenting reality on the deal, it is clear that the American people have been played. Specifically, recent statements and financial documents raise serious concerns about the integrity of the Ploughshares Fund, NPR, which is partly tax-payer funded, and the entire nuclear deal debate,” he told the Examiner in a statement.
“Unfortunately, instead of coming clean, groups like NPR continue to distort facts. For example, NPR told the AP that it had ‘no record’ of my multiple interview requests, though it had actually cancelled on me, as it now admits. This comes on top of refusing or ignoring my multiple requests to be on their programs. It is important that the American people continue to look into this questionable relationship,” he added.
NPR hosted Ploughshares’ president, Joseph Cirincione, at least twice in 2015.
News that the pro-Iran deal advocate donated generously to NPR in 2015 comes on the heels of a New York Times Magazine profile alleging the White House intentionally sold fictitious pro-nuclear agreement talking points to media and outside advocacy groups.
Ben Rhodes, President’s Obama’s deputy national security adviser, bragged he fed carefully constructed narratives to reporters who were either gullible, lazy or complicit. Rhodes also explained the White House relied heavily on outside groups to create an “echo chamber” to drown out opposition to the deal.
“In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said, explaining that his underhanded methods were the only way that the deal could get passed. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups. So we knew the tactics that worked.”
Rhodes named Ploughshares specifically as one of the outside groups that the White House leaned on to help create the aforementioned “echo chamber.”
“We drove them crazy,” the Obama spin doctor said in reference to the opponents of the nuclear agreement.
Ploughshares boasts on its website that it was instrumental in helping the White House secure the Iran deal.
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This post has been updated to include comment from Pompeo’s office.
