White House press secretary Sean Spicer said he “screwed up” when he claimed that even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons in comparison to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
“I made a mistake,” Spicer said at the Newseum in Washington on Wednesday morning. “There’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have and I screwed up. I mean you — I hope people understand that we all make mistakes. I hope I showed that I understand that I did that and that I sought people’s forgiveness because I screwed up.”
Spicer made the initial Hitler comment during Tuesday’s press briefing, then clumsily tried to walk it back. He finally apologized flat-out Tuesday evening.
“You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” Spicer told reporters first. The Nazis used the cyanide-based Zyklon B to murder at least 1 million Jews and other prisoners in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
Asked for clarification later in the briefing, Spicer said that “when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that [Assad] is doing.”
Speaking at the Newseum on Wednesday morning, Spicer acknowledged that his comments were particularly painful coming during the week of Passover.
“I hope each person can understand that part of exisiting is understanding that when you do something wrong if you own up to it, you do it — you let people know. And I did,” he said.
