Rose Mary Woods at the State Department

People of, ahem, a certain age will recall the name of Rose Mary Woods, a secretary to former president Richard Nixon.  Mrs. Woods is famous for having deleted 4-5 minutes of what would have been incriminating audio from a recording of the Oval Office conversations, during the whole Watergate investigation back in the early 1970s.  That, of course, was part of the scandal that led eventually to Nixon's resignation from the presidency in 1974.

The fact that we even know her name all these years later is a testament to the power of the news media and their ability to make sure we know, and continue to know, all the details of any scandal from which they can attack their opponents.  That would be "Republicans", in case you haven't figured that out.

We still, over 40 years later, reminded of Mrs. Woods' name and the scandal.

But do we think that in 40 years the media will be willing to share the name of the person at the United States Department of State, headed by the esteemed Hon. John Kerry, who did his or her own version of the Rose Mary Woods deletion some time in this past year?

I'm sure you are well aware of the current scandal.  At least to me it's a scandal.  James Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, and has been a target of the Obama Administration for years, including his family, in an incredibly corrupt and horribly under-reported case of investigative abuse by the Obamistas.

Mr. Rosen attended a press conference at State back in December 2013 at which he asked the State Department spokesman, Jen Psaki, about a statement made by her predecessor in the position, to the effect that no secret talks with Iran were going on.  By December 2013 we knew that talks were going on, and Rosen asked Miss Psaki if the press and Rosen in particular had been lied to by the administration -- and whether it was in fact State's policy to lie to the press and the American people.

As presented in this article from The Blaze, Psaki replied at the time, "James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that."  Of course, the only way we know that's what she said, is from the existence of recordings of that press conference other than the State Department's website and YouTube channel.

You see, Rosen discovered that, when his team went to retrieve that exchange from ordinary State recordings online.  This was after Obama's deputy national security advisor, one Ben Rhodes, made a statement in an interview to the effect that the Obama administration had been quite open about those talks with Iran even back to 2011.  Rosen knew that State had said there were no such talks, yet the administration had said that the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran's president -- in 2013 -- was the reason for the beginning of the talks.  Someone was lying.  That is why he asked Psaki the question.

Of course, when Rosen did look at the video, he discovered that his question and the answer from Miss Psaki were both magically deleted, replaced with a white flash.  Immediately, State lackeys scrambled to restore the missing footage and committed to get it back online real soon now, although at that point the proverbial cat was out of the bag.  State had lied to the press openly, and the only one telling the truth about it was Rhodes, and he was only doing so to brag about his capacity to lie to the press.

So ... who cut the recording?  We know why, although we probably don't know when it was done.  And while everyone with a microphone at State insists it was some kind of "glitch", not a soul believes that the one question "glitched" out of the recording being embarrassing as heck to State was just a coincidence.

Again -- who cut the recording?  At what point is John Kerry going to be embarrassed enough to ask some IT guy to validate accesses to the video file and change-dates and logins and all that, and declare who is responsible.  But somebody is, and somebody else probably gave the order to make the change.

Where is the press?  Where are the reporters who so madly went after everything associated with Watergate and the Oval Office recordings 40 years ago?  With technology what it is today, it should not be too hard to figure out who is responsible, although we would probably not ever know who told them to do it.

It was said even back 40 years that "the cover-up was worse than the offense."  This is a cover-up of major proportions, a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people by removing evidence of a Cabinet Department admitting to lying. And now the White House has decided that Ben Rhodes is not required to testify before Congress on the grounds of "executive privilege" -- even though executive privilege does not apply when someone has already spoken to the press.

I suppose that Jen Psaki found the best words available when she tried to explain the need for secrecy in diplomacy.  Without the cut in the video, it might have simply flown under the radar; Rosen would have looked on the State site, seen her answer in 2013, castigated State for having lied and the whole thing would have fizzled away as some right-wing press plot.

But no ... State staff recognized the potential for embarrassment and pulled a Rose Mary Woods on the recording.  If it is determined that the excising was done right after Ben Rhodes told the New York Times Magazine that those talks had been going on before Rouhani's election, then State has a lot more 'splainin' to do.  They need to "splain" regardless, but the plot line if it was recently done is appalling.

As too often in this column, I have to ask: Where is the press when we need them?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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