BUSTED: Rachel Maddow reports that State Dept lied and faked photo of Tillerson in Afghanistan

On Tuesday, the State Department was forced to admit that it lied about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan with that country’s president — and altered a photo as fake evidence of the visit.

Rachel Maddow opened her Tuesday show with the news, which was reported by the BBC after observers noticed discrepancies in different version of the photo — which was actually taken at a U.S. military installation.

“The State Department initially tried to get away with saying that this meeting between Rex Tillerson on the left and Ashraf Ghani on the right,” Maddow said, “took place in the capital city of Kabul. It did not. They did not meet in Kabul. They met, rather, inside the perimeter of a U.S. military base at Bagram.”

“The problem is that the meeting was not in Kabul, but in a windowless room in Bagram, the heavily fortified American military base a 90-minute drive away,” said The New York Times. “The misinformation, apparently meant to obscure the true venue, was betrayed by discrepancies in similar photographs released by the Americans and the Afghans.”

The State Department issued a correction on Tuesday, admitting it had faked the photo and lied about the meeting’s location and about Kabul being safe enough for the U.S. Secretary of State to openly visit.