The State Department repeatedly lied to reporters and the American people, CNN’s Jake Tapper said on his program The Lead on Thursday, the latest riposte in the ongoing scandal over doctored recordings of State Department briefings.

Tapper’s segment described three lies told by the State Department in relation to the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran.

In February 2013, months before Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, Fox News reporter James Rosen asked then-State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, if reports of secret talks between the United States and Iran were true. “With regard to the kind of thing that you’re talking about on a government-to-government level, no,” Nuland responded. This turned out not to be true.

That December, shortly after world powers reached an interim nuclear deal with Iran and it became clear that the United States had reached understandings with Iran before Rouhani’s election, Rosen recalled the answer he received in February, and pressed Nuland’s successor Jen Psaki if the State Department had lied. “James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that,” Psaki answered, essentially admitting that Nuland had lied.

Last month, amidst controversy over a New York Times Magazine profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, who admitted in the article that the Obama administration had created an “echo chamber” to mislead the public about the nuclear deal with Iran, Rosen asked a colleague to retrieve video of the December 2013 briefing. Rosen discovered that his give-and-take with Psaki over Iran, including her admission that the State Department had lied, had been erased from the video. The State Department attributed the missing footage at the time to a “glitch.”

But on Wednesday, current spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that the missing section video had been purposefully deleted, apparently on the day it was posted, due to a request from an unknown staffer at the State Department’s public affairs department. Kirby said that the deletion didn’t explicitly violate any State Department rules, and therefore no further investigation was warranted.

After recounting the sequences of events, Tapper summed up the three lies made by the administration regarding this episode:

Lie 1: No secret talks between Iran, Obama admin

Lie 2: Portion of press briefing video deleted

Lie 3: “Technical glitch” caused missing footage

Many questions about this episode need to be answered, Tapper said, including regarding the administration’s narrative in the leadup to the nuclear agreement that the election of Rouhani, “supposedly some sort of moderate,” is what enabled the U.S. to begin engaging with Iran, when “lie number 1” showed that secret contact took place several months before Rouhani’s election.

“Before we can get into why lies number 1, 2 and 3 happened, the Obama administration needs to understand that it’s not acceptable just to leave this where it is,” Tapper concluded. “Just as the public has the right to know the truth, we have a right to know who lied to us, and why.”

[Photo: Washington Free Beacon / YouTube ]