Several weeks back, the State Department blamed the missing portion of the video on a “glitch,” but abruptly changed course on Wednesday after officials reviewed the events surrounding the editing of the videotape.
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How many other times has this State Department or the administration, more broadly, deleted video that was perhaps inconvenient for them politically?
BLITZER: But then there was this subsequent, when you were the State Department spokeswoman, subsequent exchange you had with James Rosen of Fox when he asked why Victoria Nuland had lied about those direct, bilateral negotiations. The video technician allegedly said that she could not recall who relayed the order, which was placed over the phone.
On Wednesday, after Kirby admitted that the edit had been deliberate, Psaki – who is now director of communications at the White House – denied that she had ordered the cut.
“We’ve believed we’ve carried out the necessary investigation”, Toner said. He added that the department was changing its internal regulations to specify that such actions are prohibited.
State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted to reporters on Wednesday that the missing footage of a December 2013 press briefing “wasn’t a technical glitch”.
The DOS admission comes after Fox’s Rosen accused the State Department of scrubbing his question during the 2013 press briefing discussing the nuclear deal with Iran.
A Republican congressman asked the State Department inspector general to investigate why part of a public briefing that dealt with Iran nuclear talks was cut before it was posted online while another demanded documents about the incident.
Why does the government need to lie in order to forge ahead with so-called “progress”? “This is a good example of that” – later disappeared from the video record.
State officials have said someone within the agency’s Public Affairs Bureau had told someone else in the bureau to call a video technician to make the edit, but that whoever made the original request is unknown.
“In tampering with this video, the Bureau of Public Affairs has undermined its mission to ‘communicate timely and accurate information with the goal of furthering US foreign policy, ‘” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a letter to Inspector General Steve Linick.
The letter says that at a May 17 hearing, some members of the House panel voiced concern about a lack of transparency in the Iran nuclear talks.
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This came on the heels of a New York Time’s profile story about Rhodes, who conceded creating “an echo chamber” in working with reporters covering the Iran deal by “saying things that validated what we had given them to say”. For the protection of AP and its licensors, content may not be copied, altered or redistributed in any form. Now, if additional information comes into light that’s going to compel me to go into more detail and to look at it more further, I’ll do that.
