A State Department spokesman on Friday said that “a lot of overblown rhetoric” has been circulated in the press about a scandal involving the deletion of a Dec. 2, 2013 daily press briefing video dealing with Iran.
The spokesman, Mark Toner, was not specific in his critique. But it comes as his agency has come under withering criticism for not only deleting portions of the video but also refusing to conduct a thorough investigation into the matter.
“I appreciate the tough questions that you all are asking us in this room, and we are doing our best to answer, but there’s a lot of overblown rhetoric about what happened and what transpired,” Toner told reporters.
“We believe that we conducted an inquiry into what happened. We don’t have the answers, ultimately why this was done.”
On Wednesday, Toner’s colleague, John Kirby, announced that eight minutes of video from the 2013 press briefing was deleted and replaced with a white flash.
The excised portion included a question from Fox News reporter James Rosen to then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
The exchange, which centered on nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, largely flew under the radar at the time. But Psaki subtly admitted in that exchange that the State Department will lie to the American public if the situation requires it.
Rosen brought the deletion to attention last month after the publication of a New York Times profile of White House adviser Ben Rhodes. Rhodes admitted that negotiations between Iran and the U.S. were being held much earlier than the administration initially admitted.
When the deleted video was first brought to light, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said that it was most likely a “glitch.”
But Kirby put that theory to bed in his statements on Wednesday.
He said that a State Department official ordered the video deleted and that a call was relayed to an agency video technician. State’s office of the legal adviser looked into the matter but determined that the identity of the person who gave the initial order could not be determined. The video technician allegedly said that she could not recall who relayed the order, which was placed over the phone.
The State Department has suggested that it is hamstrung in its effort to get to the bottom of the scandal. But at the same time, the agency’s press officials have dismissed numerous suggestions for how to further the investigation.
“Like many of you we are asking ourselves the same questions. But we don’t have any further leads to investigate. So we’re at…a bit of a dead end. But we’re going to, as we continue to get more information, pursue that,” Toner said Friday.
Despite that claim, Toner has said that the office of the legal adviser did not look into email traffic or phone records in an attempt to find out who made the phone call to edit the video.
“Why wouldn’t you turn over every stone?” one reporter asked on Friday.
“I think we have to be mindful of the privacy of individuals involved,” Toner said. “And we also have to be mindful of the authority by which we can carry out any kind of examination of what happened.”
On Friday, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz sent a letter to Sec. of State John Kerry asking him to refer the matter to the agency’s office of the inspector general.
