ACLJ:
We have just obtained a critical email from current White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki from when she was State Department Press Secretary during the Obama-Biden Iran deal negotiations.
The email – which had been redacted but was ordered to be turned over to the ACLJ unredacted as part of our five-year-old lawsuit against the State Department – shows that the Obama Administration was trying to “shut . . . down” and “battening down the hatches” on any public discussion of the secret Obama-Biden bilateral negotiations with Iran on the disastrous Iran deal.
To understand the context of what we are learning from this email, we have to go back more than eight years.
In March 2013, then-Fox News reporter James Rosen questioned Victoria Nuland (Psaki’s predecessor at the State Department) about when negotiations between the U.S. and Iran took place. Here’s the exchange from the February 6, 2013, press briefing:
QUESTION: There have been reports that intermittently, and outside of the formal P-5+1 mechanisms[,] the Obama Administration, or members of it, have conducted direct, secret, bilateral talks with Iran. Is that true or false?
MS. NULAND: We have made clear, as the Vice President [Biden] did at Munich, that in the context of the larger P-5+1 framework, we would be prepared to talk to Iran bilaterally. But with regard to the kind of thing that you’re talking about on a government-to-government level, no.
