State Department goes nuclear on N.Y. Times

The reactor at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran.

Marie Harf with the State Department took to Twitter to slam some recent New York Times reporting – and one of the journalists who penned the piece didn’t shy away from firing back.

The at-issue report notes that Iran’s nuclear fuel stockpile increased by 20 percent in the last year or so, at a time when the White House was assuring talks with Tehran were bringing fruitful results. And the problem with that finding, which came from U.N. numbers? The report would seem to conflict with “the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been ‘frozen’ during that period,” the New York Times reported.

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One statement in the report, for instance: “The overall increase in Iran’s stockpile poses a major diplomatic and political challenge for President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry,” the correspondents wrote, in the New York Times story.

Senior adviser Harf slammed the correspondents, David Sanger and William Broad, in a very public social media rant.

“You can tweet all the ISIS reports you want – doesn’t change the fact that main contentions in your story were wrong,” she tweeted, referring to the Institute for Science and International Security think tank, and its findings.

She also decried the report in a State Department briefing to reporters as “just totally inaccurate,” and said her colleagues were “perplexed” by the story, Politico reported.

Sanger tweeted in defense: “For those at State Dept. ‘perplexed’ by story on Iran … it’s worth reading this study.” He included a link to the ISIS think tank report cited in the New York Times report.

Harf, however, sent off a rapid-fire series of tweets contesting the ISIS study and the New York Times story.

“@SangerNYT You write that ‘Western officials and experts cannot quite figure ot why’ Iran’s stockpile is at this level – not true,” she wrote.

And another: “@SangerNYT You write that ‘The overall increase in Iran’s stockpile poses a major diplomatic and political challenge’ – not true.”

And another: “@SangerNYT You write that this partially undercuts our contention that the Iranian program has been ‘frozen’ – not true.”

Harf, meanwhile, told other reporters it’s not problematic that Iran’s nuclear fuel stockpiles have been wavering in terms of levels of production, so long as when the agreement is final, Tehran leaders abide its terms.

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