Where In the Heck Is John Kerry?

You recall that last week I did a piece reminding all who would read that the esteemed Department of State under the less-esteemed John Kerry, who serves the totally-unesteemed Barack Obama, had a bad week.  This was after someone at State pulled a major Rose Mary Woods and sliced an embarrassing question out of a video transcript of a 2013 press conference and from State's YouTube site.

"A glitch", they called it last week.

"Not a glitch but an intentional deletion", it is now reported they have admitted.

"Oops, caught in a lie", I say.

Jen Psaki, who was the former State Department spokesman, was the one who answered the threatening question from James Rosen of Fox, who had asked if it was State Department policy to lie about negotiations of treaties, in this case Iran, and to lie about whether they were or were not ongoing.  There is no good answer to that, especially when you are indeed lying about it.

John Kirby, the former Navy admiral and now spokesman for the State Department, actually went on Fox News this morning to be interviewed after the story broke yesterday, that someone at State not only had deleted the specific offending questions, but had done so intentionally -- and the internal investigation was essentially over with no one accountable.  No glitch, no accident.

Here's what we know, and we're probably only knowing that because something in John Kirby's makeup and officer's honor makes it hard for him to countenance that sort of deception within the office of the State Department spokesman.  Of course, Kirby was not in that job when this deception happened; but he has to defend his office now.  And the people who did this, or at least the management of those websites, fall under that office.

We know this now, because Kirby appears reasonably credible and was at least willing to talk to people at Fox (as opposed to Obama, who regularly disinvited Fox News for certain press events, and Hillary Clinton, whose last news conference was in 2015).  Kirby said explicitly that the cuts were made, they were made by a female staff member, and that she did so on direction from someone which was given second-hand.

You know that passive-voice kind of thing?  Someone -- she conveniently can't recall who that was exactly, and Kirby didn't share her identity -- told her that someone else had said for the deletion to be made.  You know, kind of like the role of the consigliore in the Cosa Nostra, taking care of things so there is no credible connection to the mob boss because he never gives direct orders to anyone but the consigliore, who gets lawyer-client privilege that insulates the boss.

So Kirby is saying that -- follow this -- Person X told Person Y to tell the editing lady to cut out the embarrassing question and answer.  The editing lady did as she was told, but forgot who had told her to do it (Person Y), which conveniently prevents us, the public paying their salaries, from being able to ask Person Y who Person X is and whether Person X's name maybe starts with a "Ps".

This, of course, raised the logical question -- why would she, the editing lady, not recall who had asked her to do it?  Either she is lying about it (which is plausible since she is part of the Obama Administration and works in the department until not long ago run by Hillary Clinton, who only rarely brushes against the truth), or she actually doesn't remember.  And the only reason for not remembering such a thing is that it happened too often, and too many different people asked for such editing, to remember a specific request.

The Fox hosts who interviewed Kirby, to their credit, asked him pretty much that question -- how often must that deceptive editing have been done if the editing lady couldn't even remember who had asked?  He tried, I guess, to be forthcoming in the sense of saying that he couldn't answer that because the investigation wasn't done, but it was not clear if editing lady had even been asked that.  Kirby stepped around that question.

But I do have a couple questions.  I know that editing lady says she can't recall who relayed the order to chop the offending piece of video.  But how many people could have even relayed that request?  I mean, the office of the State Department press secretary can't be that big, or at least I hope it isn't, if we taxpayers are paying for it.  What are there, two, maybe three people who could possibly have asked her to do that to whom she would have promptly obeyed?  Were all of them asked? 

Kirby is the boss of that unit, and as a former flag officer is probably a pretty tough fellow.  Is Kirby not calling in everyone from that office and grilling them, maybe "no one leaves the room until I get an answer", until someone 'fesses up?  I mean, with even a shred of integrity I certainly would do so if I were Kirby.  And then when the 'fesser 'fesses, their job depends on their remembering who told them to do it.  Now that's something I'd like to see in government.  I'm pretty sure that a Donald Trump-led government would do that -- accountability to the taxpayer and all.

And last, but certainly not least ... all of this took place under the watch of the current Secretary of State, one John F. Kerry.  I know he's busy running around the world making horsecrap deals and selling us out to Iran and all.  But here we are talking about actual corruption in his department.  Is anyone, anywhere, going to make him answer the question about what happened and how it could have under his watch, or is Kirby the only one willing to talk?

Let's face it, the wolves are released by the press against CEOs and Republican governors for things that go on in their organizations that they couldn't have done anything to instigate.  "Happened on their watch, so they have to go", you know.  I'll bet Chris Christie knows what I'm talking about.

So let's ask for Mr. Kerry to explain how something like that could have happened.

Or we can call a different set of wolves, y'know.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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