State Dept.: Kerry Was Thanking the Iranians ‘for the Release, for the Diplomatic Process’

KILMEADE: “All right. Here now to discuss this is State Department spokesperson and former Admiral — our retired Admiral John Kirby. Welcome back, admiral. Great to have you here.”
KIRBY: “Thanks. Good to be with you.”
DOOCY: “Good morning.”
KILMEADE: “So we watched John Kerry make his statement and what he said was, you know, how great it is, everything defused. And then this video comes up, with our guys sitting in prone positions with their hands on their heads. Then, in a detention cell with a female sailor with a kerchief on her head and an apology on camera. Would the secretary of state had made that statement, had he known about the video and this tape and the apology?”
KIRBY: “I think so, yeah, Brian. Because he was thanking the Iranian authorities for the release — for the diplomatic process that led to their release. And we have to remember, we got these guys back within 24 hours of them falling into Iranian hands. That’s not insignificant. He was thanking — he was thanking the foreign ministry and the people that he worked with to get those guys out of there and get our boat back, too.”
KILMEADE: “Are you — admiral are you pleased the way our guys were treated? And we don’t even have confirmation on what happened yet.”
KIRBY: “That’s right. You’re exactly right. We don’t have full confirmation on exactly what happened. What led those sailors in to those waters and what happened there. We also don’t have a complete picture of the initial moments of where they met with the Iranian navy. These are the IRGC Navy, not the Iranian state navy. Look I’ve sailed up there in those waters myself. Now that was a longer time ago, of course. It’s tense. It was tense then, it’s tense now. And one of the things I’ve learned through the, my 30 years in the navy, actually two lessons — one is, first reports are always wrong. You got to give it some time. They’re going to debrief these sailors. They’re going to figure out what happened. And number two, there’s always two or three different sides to every particular story. So, we need to let the investigators in the navy do the inquiry and figure out what happened here, and before we jump to conclusions. But what we’re happy about here at the State Department is that we were able to get these guys back, you know, again, within 24 hours.”