A State Department spokesman on Thursday charged a reporter from the Russian website RT with asking “crazy” questions and being part of Russia’s propaganda machine, after the reporter started asking a series of questions about whether the U.S. approves of Turkey’s military actions in the Middle East.
“I can’t believe honestly that you aren’t embarrassed to ask these questions,” State Department spokesman John Kirby charged during the exchange, which lasted several minutes. “You have to be looking at these questions and almost laughing to yourself, don’t you? I mean, they’re absolutely crazy.”
Tensions between Russia and Turkey have been heightened since Turkey shot down a Russian plane, and on Thursday, an RT reporter asked Kirby, “Does the U.S. approve of Turkey’s development of forces in Iraq without the permission of the Iraqi government?”
.@StateDeptSpox to @RT_com reporter “I can’t believe, honestly, that you aren’t embarrassed to ask these questions.”https://t.co/louU9tziCy
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 10, 2015
Kirby immediately became frustrated and said he touched on this development in a previous State briefing. But the reporter pressed him further.
“You are not offering any assessment of what Turkey did,” the RT reporter said. “You are saying words, but virtually the U.S. is silent on what Turkey did. Is the reason for this silence the fact that the U.S. is using the Incirlik base in Turkey and doesn’t want to lose access to it?”
“Oh so here we go — this is what you’re really getting at,” Kirby replied.
Kirby then scolded the reporter again for asking repetitive questions. “Look, nobody’s being silent about this. If you’d been at the meeting the last couple days, you would have seen, or if you have looked at the transcript, you would have seen I have been nothing but open and candid about this particular troop issue.”
At one point, Kirby was interrupted and said, “I’m going to do one more time with you, one more round here, and then we’re going to go to somebody else.”
The RT reporter then asked a few longer questions, prompting Kirby to say he couldn’t follow her logic. “I love these questions that are ten minutes long, and then I’m supposed to get the grain of it out of here,” he said at one point.
“Oh, c’mon, again, another ridiculous question,” Kirby responded to her following question.
Kirby closed with his anti-Moscow speculation, saying of the Turkish troop in Iraq, “You are trying to find a way to make this some big, divisive issue … Let’s let [Turkey and Iraq] work their way through it, and keep the rest of everybody focused on ISIL, which is what we should do, and which, by the way, the Russians aren’t doing.”
“I notice that RT very rarely asks tough questions of their own government,” Kirby added. “So, you can ask whatever you want, that’s the beauty of this setting, right? You can come in here and ask me whatever you want.”
“Some of those [questions] today, absolutely ridiculous. You can do that here, in the United States. But I don’t see you asking those same questions of your own government about ISIL in Syria,” Kirby continued.
The RT reporter replied, “Which of my questions was ridiculous?” but Kirby then moved on to another reporter.
