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
How long will it be before this becomes the latest “scandal” to be loudly proclaimed by FoxNews? Somehow, it will be Hillary Clinton’s fault - we know that for sure. Better than focusing on any of those wildly unfair charges about Trump’s continuing frauds.
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Just a series of tubes…
Tempest in a micro-cuvette.
I love it when collective nouns admit to individual behavior…