The State Department’s announced Thursday the results of its investigation into what caused eight minutes of video from a Dec. 2, 2013 press briefing discussing the Iran nuclear deal to go missing.
John Kirby, who announced the results of the investigation, was met with disbelief from reporters after saying that the investigation was largely inconclusive. Particularly baffling was his re-introduction of theory that the video footage might have been removed because of a technical glitch.
That was the State Department’s initial explanation for the missing footage when it was first brought to attention in May. But State reversed course days later, saying that the video had been intentionally removed by a technician who had been ordered to do so by an official in State’s public affairs office.
The video showed former State Department spokesman Jen Psaki suggesting to Fox News reporter James Rosen that the Obama administration may have lied about the timeline of its negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. (RELATED: State Dept. Official Took ‘Deliberate Steps’ To Delete Iran Nuclear Video)
Kirby said Thursday that the agency is “confident the video of that press briefing was deliberately edited.”
However, he said that there was not enough evidence to conclude whether the edit was “nefarious.”
“It’s not impossible or inconceivable that there was an attempt to conceal information. We’re not ruling that out. We also cannot rule out the possibility that there was some technical problem,” Kirby told reporters.
Kirby said that the State Department’s office of the legal adviser had interviewed 30 current and former State Department employees and reviewed emails and documents as part of its investigation.
He said that it is still not known which State Department official ordered the video technician to edit the video. The technician was unable to remember who she spoke to.
The announcement comes a day after the watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking records related to the agency’s investigation into the edited video.
Kirby said that the State Department’s office of the legal adviser will be providing a report of its investigation to Congress and to the State Department’s office of the inspector general.
“There’s no evidence to suggest it was made to conceal information from the public,” Kirby told reporters. He asserted that the video was edited in a “choppy manner” which suggested that it was not done to cover up the act of editing.
“It is possible the white flash was inserted because the video had lost footage due to technical or electrical problems that were effecting our control room servers around that time,” he added.
Kirby said that 18 minutes after the briefing concluded, the video was uploaded and somehow shortened. That meant that the recording of the briefing was shorter than the briefing itself.
That “would convey that a cut of some kind was made very, very quickly after the briefing — much sooner than when the technician remembers receiving the phone call asking for the cut to be made,” said Kirby.
“Maybe we may be dealing with a memory issue, maybe that’s inconsistent. Maybe there could have been a technical problem that caused the video to automatically be shortened when it was first uploaded,” he continued.
One reporter vehemently challenged the latter theory.
“It seems like such a ridiculous explanation that I’m shocked that you’re providing it here,” the reporter told Kirby.
In late May, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters of the video edit: “genuinely, we think it was a glitch.”
Kirby corrected that claim on June 1.
“This wasn’t a technical glitch. This was a deliberate step to excise the video,” he said at the time.
