Via Daily Caller:
Congress wants to know if the State Department held any influence on the U.S. Navy sailor who apologized to Iran after he and his nine other sailors were arrested and detained by the regime. The video, which aired on Iranian television, showed all ten sailors kneeling on the decks of their ships with their hands behind their heads.
The U.S. sailors, who were detained by Iran Tuesday and later released Wednesday morning, spoke to the State Department before one of the naval officers was video taped making an apology to the Iranian regime, a Republican congressman says.
“It was a mistake. That was our fault. And we apologize for our mistake,” the sailor said, in a video clip posted by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.
When asked if they had a “special problem” the sailor replied, “We had no problem, sir.”
Additionally, the one female sailor detained was made to wear a makeshift traditional head wrap.
Florida Republican Rep. Tom Rooney, a member of the House Select permanent Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Caller Thursday during the GOP retreat, “We talked about that [during the retreat] and we’ll have to wait and hear from him, but we do know that the State Dept. did talk to those guys before he made that comment, so it was very kind of, honestly, suspicious why he would just come out and make that kind of a statement.”