Israel Matzav

US State Department: 'So we lied'

The State Department has now confirmed that it deleted a question from James Rosen of Fox News from a December 2013 briefing by Jen Psaki. I first reported the story three weeks ago.

Today @statedeptspox confirmed footage of a Dec 2013 briefing edited to remove a @JamesRosenFNC Iran talks query https://t.co/Uin7mfRNfj

— Dave Clark (@DaveClark_AFP) June 1, 2016

This is from the second link. It's a follow-up to the story about Ben Rhodes orchestrating a campaign of lies to push the Iran nuclear deal forward.

After Samuels’s story kicked up a Washington mediastorm, Rosen asked a colleague to check for the video of Psaki answering his question about diplomatic mendacity. The colleague came back with an eerie response: The exchange was gone from the videotape, replaced by a flash of white light. The gap was evident not only on the State Department website, but also on its YouTube page. State Department officials, in a series of briefings, struggled to explain the matter. Trudeau talked about a glitch but also noted that there was no evidence that this glitch had selectively attacked any other embarrassing moments from the press briefings. Kirby later expressed deep concern about the subject.

Today, Kirby brought the goods:

A portion of the State Department’s December 2nd, 2013 press briefing was missing from the video that we posted on our YouTube account and on our website. That missing portion covered a series of questions about U.S negotiations with Iran. When alerted to this, I immediately directed the video to be restored in its entirety with a full and complete copy that exists and had existed since the day of the briefing on the Defense Video and Imagery Distribution system website otherwise known as DIVIDS. I also verified that the full transcript of the briefing which we also post on our website was intact and had been so since the date of the briefing. I asked the office of the legal advisor to look at this including a look at any rules that we had in place. In so doing, they learned that 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. To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have in place any rules governing this type of action 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. Specifically, we are going to make clear that all video and transcripts from daily press briefings will be immediately and permanently archived in their entirety. In the unlikely event, that narrow compelling circumstances require edits to be made such as the inadvertent release of privacy protected information, they will only be made with the expressed permission of the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs and with an appropriate level of annotation and disclosure. I have communicated this new policy to my staff and it takes effect immediately.

Those are worthy commitments, for the future.

As for the past, more must be known — though it probably won’t. Followup questions to Kirby drilled in on the whodunnit aspect of the video disappearance. Would the department do more investigating to determine precisely how this happened? No, said Kirby, who noted that the individual who received the phone request for video elimination doesn’t remember “anything other than that the caller was passing on the request from somewhere else in the bureau.” Furthermore, said Kirby, “There were no rules in place to govern this sort of action, so while I believe it was an inappropriate step to take, I see little foundation for pressing forward with a formal investigation.” Spoken like a true bureaucrat.

In other words, the cow has escaped anyway so why bother checking who was responsible for leaving the barn door open. I'm old enough to recall a President named Nixon who was impeached for similar offenses. He was also forced to resign when the enormity of what he had done came to light as a result of a Supreme Court order that what remained of his tapes be disclosed.

Obama is now in his 8th (and thankfully final) year in office. He will never be impeached. He would never resign even if the enormity of what he did were to come out while he is still in office. He has no shame.

And as a result he has brought shame to America. May he rot in hell.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Ben Rhodes, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Jen Psaki, lies, US State Department

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:44 AM