Outrage Rising Over State Department’s Wiping of Official Video Showing Obama Administration Lie About Iran Deal (VIDEO)
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The Obama administration is facing a wave of angry criticism after the State Department confirmed it deleted parts of a video showing the administration had lied about the Iran nuclear deal. Photo: Amanda Lucidon/ White House.
The US State Department is facing a wave of angry criticism after a spokesman confirmed that someone inside the department made a “deliberate request” for the scrubbing of part of an official video showing the Obama administration misled journalists on the Iran deal.
State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted to reporters on Wednesday that the missing footage of a December 2013 press briefing “wasn’t a technical glitch.” During the 2013 briefing, then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed to Fox News reporter James Rosen that earlier claims of direct, secret talks between the US and Iran — which were denied in February 2013 by then-spokesperson Victoria Nuland — were indeed true. “There are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that,” Psaki said regarding the discrepancy.
Fox News discovered earlier this month that the exchange had been edited out of official State Department archive footage — including eight minutes of comments and further questions on the Iran deal. Officials suggested a “glitch” had occurred.
On Wednesday, Kirby said the State Department had subsequently investigated the matter and found that on the same day as the briefing, a video editor received a call from a State Department public affairs official who issued “a specific request…to excise that portion of the briefing.” No further investigation will be held, he said, since the State Department has reached a dead end.
On Thursday, the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, demanding the full footage of the December 2013 press briefing as well as “documents sufficient to identify, by name and job title, the individual or individuals who made and received the request to deliberately delete the video footage.” The State Department has until 5 pm on June 8 to comply with the committee’s requests.
On Friday, Congressman Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, sent a letter to the State Department’s Inspector General (IG), Steve Linick, to request an investigation into the incident.
Royce wrote, “In tampering with this video, the Bureau of Public Affairs has undermined its mission to ‘communicate timely and accurate information with the goal of furthering U.S. foreign policy.’ This is all the more troubling given that the video in question dealt with hugely consequential nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper devoted part of his Thursday evening show to the scandal, in which he sharply rebuked the Obama administration and accused the White House of lying to the public on three separate but substantive matters:
There was a first lie told to us about the secret talks between Iran and the Obama administration. We’ll call that lie number one. Now Jen Psaki acknowledged lie number one later that year, 2013. But then someone removed that acknowledgement from the official video. Let’s refer to the scrubbing as lie number two. And then, three weeks ago, we were lied to again, with the whole glitch thing. We’ll call that lie number three.
Tapper said there “are so many questions about all three of these lies,” including whether the first lie had anything to do with the Obama administration’s pushed narrative to sell the Iran deal. “Just as the public has the right to know the truth, we have a right to know who lied to us and why,” Tapper said. The video edit is “a scrubbing of the public record and should outrage every American.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner on Friday, a senior official at a Washington, DC-based organization active in the Iran deal debate said the “administration’s earlier dishonesty is being exposed and now they are scrambling to cover it up, and that’s creating its own problems.”
“The Obama administration misled the American people, journalists and lawmakers about the extent of American concessions and about what the Iranians were obligated to do as part of the deal,” he said. “They overplayed Iranian concessions and underplayed American ones. The administration clearly hoped the Iranians would play along for at least a year or two without pushing the envelope and exposing their dishonesty. However, the Iranians refused to play along because they are actually hardliners who want to undermine American interests.”
According to the official, the scrubbing scandal is now part of a larger net of lies cast by the Obama administration regarding the nuclear deal. “This is exactly what it looks like. The administration lied. They covered it up. And now they have to lie about the coverup,” the source told The Algemeiner.
The footage of Psaki’s comments gained new significance last month in light of a New York Times Magazineprofile of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who boasted of misleading the American public to garner support for the Iran deal. Rhodes revealed how he created an “echo chamber” among susceptible young journalists, policy experts and officials to spin the administration’s narrative of the nuclear agreement, including false and misleading claims.
Watch CNN’s Jake Tapper’s remarks here: https://youtu.be/_wEdHfND1U0
MORE:
Obama Names Official Linked to MB as Gov't Liaison to Muslims
Zaki Barzinji (Photo: White House)
The Obama Administration has chosen the grandson of a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect as its new liaison to the Muslim-American community. The new official also led the youth section of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an identified Muslim Brotherhood entity that was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing trial.
The official, Zaki Barzinji, previously served as the deputy director of intergovernmental affairs for Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (more on that further down in this article), who is now under investigation for possible political corruption. Before that, Barzinjiwas the president of the Muslim Youth of North America, whichdescribes itself as the youth wing of ISNA.
ISNA was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history, with the Justice Department specifically listing it as an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s own documents list ISNA at the top of its list of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”
ISNA’s links to the Brotherhood and Hamas are laid out in bipartisan legislation titled the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act. The bill now has over 75 supporters in the House and Senate.
How did Zaki Barzinji rise through the ranks in ISNA and McAuliffe’s office to become the new associate director of public engagement for the White House?
He is the grandson of a prominent Islamist leader named Jamal Barzinji, who passed away last year. Indeed, Jamal Barzinji was a founder and/or senior official in virtually every group identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front in America. He also frequently donated to political campaigns. He was nearly prosecuted, but the Obama Justice Department dropped the planned indictment.
Zaki accepted an award on his grandfather’s behalf in 2013 at the Hamas/Brotherhood-linked Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia, which the late Barzinji helped found. The mosque is most known for having Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki as its imam in 2001 before he officially joined the terrorist group.
Jamal Barzinji was most involved with the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). The group’s office, Jamal Barzinji’s home and the offices of other organizations that Jamal Barzinji was affiliated with were raided in 2002 as part of a terrorism investigation. Theaffidavit said has being investigated because of evidence leading the U.S. government to “believe that [Jamal] Barzinji is not only closely associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (as evidenced by ties to [Sami] Al-Arian…), but also with Hamas.”
Jamal Barzinji’s group was so close to Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian that IIIT’s president considered his group and Al-Arian’s to be essentially one entity. The indictment of Al-Arian and his colleagues says that they “would and did seek to obtain support from influential individuals, in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights.”
Keep that quote and the investigation into McAuliffe’s political contributions in mind when you consider how Zaki Barzinji apparently rose to his new position with some help from his grandfather’s political connections.
In 2011, IIIT (again, the late Jamal Barzini’s organization) donated$10,000 to the New Dominion PAC, which has strong Democratic party ties in the state, particularly as a donor to current Senator (former Governor) Tim Kaine, who spoke at a New Dominion PAC event honoring Jamal Barzinji in 2011.
Barzinji’s grandson became the outreach coordinator for McAuliffe’s campaign for governor in April 2013, per his LinkedIn profile. The Barzini/IIIT-linked PAC raised $15,000 for McAuliffe’s campaign two years later on September 29, 2013.
Zaki Barzinji became McAuliffe’s special assistant for policy in January 2014 and was promoted to deputy director of intergovernmental affairs in July 2014. This month, he became the White House’s liaison to the Muslim-American community as its new associate director of public engagement. Quite a rapid rise for a 27-year old.
There are no Islamist-sounding quotes from Zaki Barzinji but important questions remain.
Is it really wise to have the grandson of a Muslim Brotherhood terror suspect, who served as the head of the youth wing of an identified Muslim Brotherhood identity with Hamas links, as the White House’s liaison to the Muslim-American community?
What role did the political ties and donations of his Islamist grandfather and IIIT play in his remarkably fast rise through state politics and to the White House?
Ryan Mauro is ClarionProject.org’s national security analyst, a fellow with Clarion Project and an adjunct professor of homeland security. Mauro is frequently interviewed on top-tier television and radio. Read more, contact or arrange a speaking engagement.
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