Farkas protests “strange video”

The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord has obtained an exclusive statement from Evelyn Farkas on the video of her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show earlier this month that we posted in “A Times source outs herself.” This is the statement that she provided to Lord verbatim, although I have added paragraphing in the interest of readability:

Unfortunately, a few days ago a strange video of unknown provenance popped up on the internet with a wild misinterpretation of comments I made on the air in March. The topic of the particular segment — the video was selectively cut to include only my comments out of context — was the Russia election hack/information operation and a NYT story that described Obama administration members trying to get intelligence information on the Russian hack to Congress.

I explained, in my role as an analyst, that I knew there were concerns in Washington about what the Russians did and whether the American public would find out what happened. I stated that I was worried that Congress wasn’t being briefed — according to normal procedures, which I know well from my 8 years as a Professional Staff Member with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

I shared my concerns with both sides of the aisle about the need to get all the information the Obama administration had with regard to the Russian hacking of our elections and any potential complicity by Americans. I was out of government, I didn’t have any classified information, or any knowledge of “tapping” or leaking or the NYT article before it came out. But I knew well from my time in government how the Russians operated and I could sense from media reports that the administration was concerned. I wanted to make sure that the standard procedure of White House briefing the Congress was taking place so that Congress knew everything the White House knew about what the Russians had done.

At the end of the interview I did start a new thought “that’s why they leaked,” but got cut off. If I’d had time I would have explained that leaking is illegal and I would never condone it, but it seems that the people who were leaking to the New York Times might have also been concerned that the legislative branch was being left in the dark.

It’s a shame Farkas doesn’t see fit to provide the missing context or explain what she meant when she expressed her concern that “if they found out HOW we knew what we knew about their, the Trump staff, dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods — meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”

Below is the video of the segment posted at the Morning Joe site by MSNBC on March 2. It runs 6:09. The relevant passage commences at 4:45. Who edited what?

Farkas calls it “a strange video of unknown provenance.” I think we can safely say the provenance of the video is MSNBC. Something is strange here, I think we can agree, but so far as I can tell it’s not the video itself.

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