Brian Williams

NBC executives who are deciding the fate of suspended anchorman Brian Williams have reviewed an internal video compilation of his exaggerated and embellished stories, a clip reel that could be decisive in determining Williams’s status at the network.

The video, produced by the team of NBC journalists assigned to review Williams’s statements in media appearances, makes a vivid case against the anchor, according to people familiar with it, isolating a number of questionable statements Williams has made over several years.

Williams was suspended by NBC News for six months in early February over statements he made about facing rockets and gunfire while traveling in a U.S. military helicopter at the start of the Iraq war in 2003. He has remained silent since then as other statements have come under scrutiny.

The compilation video has been closely held. Among the few who have seen it are Stephen Burke, chief executive of NBC Universal, and NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, the principal executives determining Williams’s status.

People inside the network, who spoke about the video on the condition of anonymity because negotiations with Williams are continuing, said it could be used as leverage against him or as a basis to reassign him to a lesser role within NBC or MSNBC.

One of Williams’s questionable accountsis about receiving a piece of the top-secret Black Hawk helicopter that crash-landed during the U.S. military raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011.

In a series of appearances on CBS’s “Late Show With David Letterman” after the raid, Williams described his relationship with SEAL Team 6, the elite Navy unit that assassinated bin Laden, and implied that the relationship led to his receiving the coveted memento.

In May 2012, Williams told Letterman that he flew into Baghdad just after the war’s 2003 start “on a blackout mission at night with elements” of the commando team. He said he struck up an acquaintance with one of the team’s members, who later sent him a “throat-cutter” — or service knife — as a gift.

In January 2013, Williams told Letterman the following: “About six weeks after the bin Laden raid, I got a white envelope, and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned. And attached to it was a piece of the fuselage, the fuselage from the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. And I don’t know how many pieces survived, but I — “

“Sent to you by one of the — ” Letterman asked.

“Yeah, one of my friends,” Williams answered.

In a radio interview in February 2014, Williams said he had “friends among the Special Operations folks in the Pentagon, and I have a piece of the fuselage of the chopper that didn’t make it in Abbottabad. It’s one of the toughest things to get, and the president has a piece of it, as well. And I didn’t ask any questions, [but] I have a pretty good idea [where it came from]. But I’ve spent time during the coverage of these dual wars with members of the very same group who were there.”

Although current and former SEAL members have doubted that Williams embedded with the commandos, at least one aspect of the story appears to be true — that Williams did receive a piece of the helicopter, but not from the SEALs, according to several people at NBC.

The source of the souvenir was an unidentified journalist from another news organization who visited bin Laden’s compound after the raid and collected pieces of the aircraft, they said.

That journalist then passed some of these pieces to Robert Windrem, a veteran NBC News reporter and “Nightly News” producer who specializes in national security issues. Windrem sent a piece to Williams, knowledgeable persons said Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Windrem did not respond to requests for comment.

One person at NBC who is familiar with the incident said that Williams might have been mistaken but wasn’t dishonest in implying that the SEALs had sent him the helicopter piece. Given that there was no identifiable sender, Williams simply assumed that it had come from the elite military team, he said.

Nevertheless, the story raises questions. Foremost is why Williams, a journalist, did not attempt to verify the source of the gift before suggesting publicly that it came from the SEALs. It also seems unlikely that members of the commando team would have had the time or inclination to recover pieces of the damaged chopper during their daring 40-minute raid. (Accounts have said that the SEALS blew up the helicopter to prevent exploitation of its radar-evading technology.) .

Williams’s representative, Washington attorney Robert Barnett, declined to comment.

NBC has not determined whether Williams will resume anchoring “Nightly News” or return to the broadcast network or its cable news network, MSNBC, in another capacity. His suspension ends in early August. It’s also not clear when the network intends to announce a decision.

Network insiders have said that Williams embellished his experiences on at least 11 occasions, although they have not disclosed a list of particulars.