White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said he wouldn’t have used the same analogy as Attorney General William Barr, who compared coronavirus lockdowns to slavery.

“Well, when we look at lockdowns, when you look at individual liberties and who we are as a nation, a nation of freedom, many times when we give up those civil liberties, and I’m one that believe in those civil liberties are inherent, they’re enshrined by our Constitution, and … we need to protect those because when bad things happen, we sometimes, not always but sometimes, start to take away the liberties that are enshrined in and are part of our constitutional rights and make us different as Americans than many other countries,” Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, said on Thursday outside the White House.