GMAT Sentence Correction (SC) | Re: When the reporter asked about the status of the budget

yeah it is important. in fact without this phrase i wouldn't have been able to decide between"was fashioning" AND"had been fashioning" . the reasoning is as follows:
as i have said in reported speech the tenses makes a usual jump. now that is a very crude way of saying but what does that actually mean?
suppose i met the governor and he said following thing to me: "at that very moment, his team is fashioning...."
...

---