The Obama administration is spinning its own spin on the Iran nuclear deal, explaining two omissions from official records of public press briefings regarding questions on the U.S.-led multilateral agreement.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest this week did not categorically deny that any official in the Obama administration misled the public regarding the Iran nuclear deal, but when twice pressed by a reporter, instead chose to state in the “affirmative” that the administration made a truthful case.
“Let me just state in the affirmative, which is the administration has made a forceful and fact-based, accurate, and truthful case about how the American people and the international community benefit from an international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Earnest said.
Last week, State Department officials admitted that a question and answer at a December 2013 press briefing about the Iran deal had been deleted from the video. Over the weekend, ABC News first reported that the response to a question at a White House briefing in May about the Iran deal had also been deleted from the written transcript. Both questions were in response to Fox News.
Earnest said “crosstalk” in the May briefing prevented his answer from being heard by the transcriber. Asked about the matter again on Tuesday, Earnest said he would not be willing to review the video again, with an eye toward amending the transcript.
Amid fierce debate over the already controversial agreement, the omissions from a State Department press briefing video and a White House press briefing transcript casts additional doubt on President Barack Obama’s early pledge to make transparency the “touchstone” of his administration.
This is “smoke and mirrors” from “one of the least transparent administrations in U.S. history,” Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, said.
Gardiner argued the Iran deal was carried out in a secretive way even before the edited video and transcript.
“The Obama administration deceived the American people with regard to the Iran negotiations and the Iran nuclear deal,” Gardiner said. “This has been a grand deception that is unacceptable and recklessly undermines America on the world stage.”
Unrelated to the Iran deal, in March, the White House website seemed to block audio of French President Francois Hollande using the words “Islamist terrorism.”
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating the State Department matter, as committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, has asked the department for additional information on what official intentionally made the change.
Earlier this year, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes boasted about creating an “echo chamber” of experts to shape press coverage of the Iran deal.
When asked about the deleted video by the State Department and the omission in the White House transcript, Earnest pushed back Monday, saying the two incidents were not related.
“It’s important to note the distinction there between what was apparently an effort at the State Department to make a specific decision to remove a portion of the video. That’s something I’ve said is inconsistent with what you’d expect from the whole goal of engaging in a public briefing,” Earnest said. “The situation you are citing is relating to a specific issue with a transcript that relates to two words. I think it would be difficult to make the case that there is a link between the two.”
Earnest further added more scrutiny should be directed at critics of the Iran deal, whom he said were consistently wrong.
“And what I think is a much worthier endeavor is to scrutinize the claims of those individuals who criticize the Iran deal falsely,” Earnest said. “There are individuals who suggested that somehow Iran would never agree to this agreement. They were wrong.”
