The State Department admitted this week that it selectively edited a video clip of a 2013 news conference to remove a reporter’s question about negotiations with Iran.
Press Secretary John Kirby confirmed that the inquiry from Fox News reporter James Rosen had been purposefully removed from the video recording of the proceedings. The department had previously claimed the missing portion was the result of a glitch.
The edit occurred during the tenure of a previous spokesperson at State, Jen Psaki, who now serves as the communications director at the White House.
“I had no knowledge of nor would I have approved of any form of editing or cutting my briefing transcript on any subject while @StateDept,” Psaki tweeted on Wednesday.
Kirby, however, could not confirm whether or not this incident was a one-off, or if more press briefing videos had been edited at the department with Psaki at the helm.
“The short answer to your question is, I don’t know,” he said on Fox News Thursday morning. “And I don’t know that there’s any way I can know,” Kirby added, stating that it would be a waste of time and resources “to go back and look at every single press briefing over the last three or four years.”
The deleted question was from a December 2, 2013 press briefing. Rosen asked Psaki if it is State Department policy to lie to the press in order to preserve the secrecy of certain diplomatic negotiations. He was specifically referring to early discussions between Washington and Tehran in the lead-up to the nuclear deal—talks that the department initially denied were taking place.
Psaki admitted in response “there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress.”
Although the exchange was included in the official transcript of the briefing—it was deleted from the video record published to the department’s official YouTube channel.
“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,” Kirby explained to reporters on Wednesday. He claimed that State currently didn’t have policies to prevent such behavior.
“To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have in place any rules governing this type of action,” he said. “Therefore we are taking immediate steps to craft appropriate protocols on this issue as we believe that deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is not in keeping with the State Department’s commitment to transparency and public accountability.”
The State Department was not known for obsessive control over its video messaging when Psaki was its spokesperson. In late 2014, The Sentinel caught Psaki trashing her own talking point on a State Department feed at a daily press briefing. The topic was the acquittal of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.
“That Egypt line is ridiculous,” she said into a hot mic to Associated Press reporter Mike Lee as the briefing wound down and the lights dimmed.
