At a press conference on September 9, 2013, she asked Secretary of State John Kerry about any possibility for the Syrian government to avoid a U.S. strike. Kerry's answer, that Assad could "turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week" (although later his answer was retracted as "a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied using" by a State Department spokesperson), led Russia's foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov to propose this as a solution to the crisis.