White House communications director Jen Psaki again denied Friday any knowledge of the State Department’s intentional deletion of a portion of a State Department press briefing from December 2013 that shows the Obama administration possibly deceiving the media and public about the Iran nuclear deal.
Appearing on CNN with host Wolf Blitzer, Psaki, who was the State Department spokesman at the time of the press briefing, called the deliberate video edit a "stunning case of poor judgment" but said she had no involvement with it.
Fox News first reported last month that video from a State Department press briefing two years ago showing possible deception by the administration had been deleted for unknown reasons.
Blitzer first described how "someone had deliberately told that video tape editor to go ahead and delete about seven or eight minutes of the official video" before asking Psaki if she has tried to find out who instructed the video editor to remove part of the briefing.
"Wolf, I don’t have any more information than you do," Psaki said. "This is a stunning case of poor judgment, whether that was incompetence or lack of experience or both. I don’t know the answer to that. The fact is ... I had no involvement with the editing. I had no knowledge of this, nor would I have ever approved of it.
"The whole purpose of the State Department briefing is to provide a forum to have a debate and a discussion with reporters ... This really flies in the face of that effort and something many of us spent time really believing in and hopefully delivering on from that podium."