The State Department conceded Wednesday that an archived video of a 2013 press briefing about the negotiations surrounding the Iran nuclear deal was intentionally deleted from the department’s website.
State Department spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that the video segment was deleted at the direction of an unknown individual after initially saying that the video disappeared as the result of a technical glitch.
“There was a deliberate request [to delete the footage] – this wasn’t a technical glitch,” he said, according to Fox News.
Kirby said that he was unable to find out who ordered the portion of the video to be deleted and said that there were not any explicit rules against such an action, but he said that the deletion was not appropriate.
“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,” he said, according to Fox News.
He said that going forward, the State Department would make sure “all video and transcripts from daily press briefings will be immediately and permanently archived in their entirety,” according to Politico.
Kirby addressed the video segment following inquiries from Fox News reporter James Rosen, whose question to then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki was deleted.
During a Thursday morning appearance on “Fox and Friends,” Kirby thanked Rosen for bringing the deletion to his attention.
In the deleted portion of the video, Psaki addressed a question about when the administration truly began the Iran deal negotiations and suggested that the U.S. entered into secret talks before publicly acknowledging the intention to do so.
“There are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress,” she said at the time, according to ABC News. “This is a good example of that.”
Psaki denied any knowledge of the deletion.
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
— Jen Psaki (@Psaki44) June 1, 2016
