The State Department’s admission that it deleted footage of a spokeswoman’s comments on the Iran nuclear deal is raising concerns about the extent of such practices — including renewed questions over how two words in the French president’s remarks at a March summit got dropped from a White House video.
(FOX)- Francois Hollande, at that summit, made a reference to “Islamist terrorism” — a term President Obama does not use. However, the translator’s mention of this was dropped from the original White House video.
Officials at the time said the audio gap was the result of a “technical issue,” not an attempt to scrub or censor Hollande’s comments, and that an updated video with the complete audio was posted on WhiteHouse.gov soon after the problem was recognized.
They also noted the official transcript posted on the White House website always included the dropped words.
The controversy then seemed to fade — until the State Department last week acknowledged an unidentified official had intentionally deleted several minutes of footage from a 2013 briefing.
Citing that admission, the Media Research Center — the conservative-leaning government watchdog group that first flagged the dropped audio from the March summit — renewed its allegations about the Hollande remarks.
“This ‘technical error’ excuse is just as implausible as the [State Department] ‘glitch’ alibi,” MRCTV blog editor Craig Bannister said in a post.