The State Department is facing heavy scrutiny after acknowledging that it selectively edited video of a 2013 press briefing about the Iran nuclear talks.

Here's a timeline of events:

Feb. 6, 2013: Initial exchange about when talks started with Iran.

Fox News reporter James Rosen asks then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland about reports that the Obama administration has already started conducting "direct secret bilateral talks with Iran." She says no.

Rosen: There have been reports that intermittently, and outside of the formal P5+1 mechanisms, the Obama administration, or members of it, have conducted direct secret bilateral talks with Iran. Is that true or false?
Nuland: We have made clear, as the vice president did at Munich, that in the context of the larger P5+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.

Dec. 2, 2013: Days after Iran and the P5+1 nations reach their interim agreement, Rosen asks then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki whether talks with Iran had actually started two years earlier, in 2011.

While Psaki makes no clear admission that the talks did start in 2011, she does seem to admit that government officials might not tell the truth in order to maintain the secrecy of an event.

In May 2016, State would finally admit that it was these comments that were immediately removed from the video of the press briefing. However, the full transcript of the briefing would remain online.

May 8, 2016: New York Times Magazine interview with White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes published.

The interview is immediately controversial over Rhodes' implications of how the White House obfuscated to get the Iran deal done, again raising questions about when precisely the administration began talking with Iranian officials.

May 9, 2016: Edited video first reported.

Rosen reports Monday night that a section of that Dec. 2, 2013 briefing is missing from the department's official video, replaced with an obvious white flash indicating a deletion.

This is the key part of the exchange that went missing:

QUESTION: Is it the policy of the State Department, where the preservation or the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie in order to achieve that goal?
MS. PSAKI: James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that. Obviously, we have made clear and laid out a number of details in recent weeks about discussions and about a bilateral channel that fed into the P5+1 negotiations, and we've answered questions on it, we've confirmed details. We're happy to continue to do that, but clearly, this was an important component leading up to the agreement that was reached a week ago.

May 10, 2016: Missing video reappears, called a "glitch".

The morning after the first revelations about the missing video, the State Department clip is restored.

Later that afternoon, spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau tells reporters, "There was a glitch in the State Department video."

May 11, 2016: State Department says it's "double-checking" the video "glitch."

"At this stage, we believe it was a glitch, but we're double-checking and making sure because we have that commitment," Trudeau says.

June 1, 2016: State Department admits video was intentionally edited.

After three weeks of sticking with its "glitch" explanation, State Department spokesman John Kirby announces that the video was in fact purposefully altered to remove part of the discussion about the Iran nuclear talks at the request of an unknown State Department official. Kirby says a "specific request was made" but "we do not know who made the request to edit the video, or why."

Psaki, now the White House communications director, tweets that she knew nothing about the edit that was made to her briefing video.


June 2, 2016: More officials deny involvement, State Department declares investigation a "dead end."

Marie Harf, a top adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry and a department spokeswoman at the time, also denies pushing to edit the video and says she doesn't know who did it.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner says, "We believe we've carried out the necessary investigation" and "we have hit a dead end in terms of finding out more information."

June 3, 2016: Republicans call for inspector general investigation, department says it has no email or phone records, Kerry weighs in.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., sends a letter to the State Department inspector general requesting an investigation into how the deletion occurred and who ordered it.

Later that afternoon, Toner tells reporters there are no records of who made the edit request: "The system is such that internal phone call records are only available for a 24-hour period. So, those records, internal calls, would no longer be available. I believe they're just simply gone."

In Paris, Kerry declares the video editing "stupid and clumsy and inappropriate."

June 6, 2016: Republicans demand Kerry testify.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sends a letter to the State Department calling on Kerry to testify about the video situation.

June 7, 2016: State Department suggests Kerry will skip testifying.

June 8, 2016: Kerry orders second investigation.

The State Department announces Kerry has ordered a second investigation into how the video came to be edited, after spokesmen declared the first investigation hit a "dead end."

"Given the secretary's strong interest, given Congress' strong interest and given the media's strong interest, we've decided to continue to look at that," spokesman Mark Toner says.