State Department Admits It Intentionally Deleted 2013 Video Footage About Misleading The Press Over Iran Nuke Deal

.@RichardGrenell: There is a cover up going on at the State Departmenthttps://t.co/hyiGvLlr1G

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) June 2, 2016

Fox News — The State Department, in a stunning admission, acknowledged Wednesday that an official intentionally deleted several minutes of video footage from a 2013 press briefing, where a top spokeswoman seemed to acknowledge misleading the press over the Iran nuclear deal.

I’ve been all up Katie Couric’s arse about editing and misleading for the last week; now it’s time to jump all over the State Department’s arse. These stories show how influential deliberate editing can be — how editing can change the narrative, can make one appear not how they should appear, but how they want to appear. These stories show, perhaps, why Hank’s been Portnoy’s best friend for the last few years?

This story is all about the Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015. The deal is extremely controversial and polarizing. The quick gist of it is this: Iran is bad. They hate basically everyone. Bad, hateful regimes acquiring nuclear firepower is a nightmare scenario. So the US, the Euro Union and a handful of other nations negotiated with Iran do to essentially whatever it took to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. These negotiations and their terms are, of course, intensely tricky.

Since Iran is bad and evil and hates women and Jews and denies the Holocaust ever happened and props up ISIS, many folks didn’t want us negotiating with them. Our government knew this, and public opinion is very important to how their agenda plays in conjunction with Congress to getting things passed, so they lied.

In a 2013 presser, while negotiations were indeed going on but the State Department was denying they were, then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki said this:

“There are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that.”

The State Department was misleading the press, which is a massive no-no. The department’s briefings get published online and, mysteriously, the 8-minute section of that briefing from 2013 was edited out and replaced with a white flash screen on both the department’s website and YouTube channel earlier this year.

Last month, a former top White House aid essentially bragged in an interview about how easy it was to mislead the naive press over the Iran deal. This thrust the “missing tape” into the spotlight, which the State Department responded to by calling the phenomenon of it going missing a “glitch.”

Psaki, who is now the White House communications director, said this about the whole debacle:

“I had no knowledge of nor would I have approved of any form of editing or cutting my briefing transcript on any subject while at the State Department.”

Yesterday, they admitted it was an intentional edit by a department official.

And here we have a classic case of the coverup being worse than the crime. Look, everyone knew the US leading negotiations with Iran was going to be an unpopular, controversial move. The State Department attempted to hide those negotiations while they were ongoing — it’s a lose/lose to make that public. If the negotiations “succeed,” people will hate on you for making a deal (as they have). If they “fail,” people will shit on you for, obviously, failing.

So they kept it quiet. But they HAD to know it would come out, which it did. And that’s fine. Not everyone is going to love it, but that’s fine. That’s politics. The minute you go back and start deleting footage, though? Smell ya later. Awful look. Like when morons on twitter delete tweets that 10,000 people have screenshots of. The story becomes way more about “Dumbass deletes controversial tweets!” and less about what dumbass actually tweeted.

Don’t give the story extra legs. PR 101. Look at us: When we say dumb shit we just double, triple, quadruple down until the two or three worst things we’ve ever said are the only things anyone ever identifies us by. It’s genius.