White House press secretary Sean Spicer continued his apology tour on Wednesday morning, telling MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren that he “let the president down” with his “inexcusable and reprehensible” mistake during a pre-planned interview at the Newseum symposium, titled “The President and the Press.”
“I made a mistake. There’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have and I screwed up,” Spicer said. “I hope people understand that we all make mistakes. I hope I show that I understand that I did that…. I sought people’s forgiveness because I screwed up.”
Spicer continued: “I hope each person can understand that part of existing is understanding that when you do something wrong you own up to it.”
Spicer admitted it’s painful to know that he screwed up and offended a lot of people.
“From a professional standpoint, it’s obviously disappointing. I think the president had an unbelievable couple of weeks… I’ve let the president down,” he said.
Spicer has appeared on a variety of programs to apologize for his comment on Tuesday, where he mistakenly said that Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II in a botched attempt to shame Russia’s alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — who used sarin gas against his own people earlier this month.
Spicer quickly apologized for the error, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he was trying to make a point but “mistakingly used an inappropriate, insensitive reference.”
When a reporter asked Spicer to clarify the Hitler remarks during Tuesday’s briefing, the White House spokesman dug himself into an even deeper hole.
“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no … he was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said, adding that Hitler didn’t drop gas on his people but instead, “brought them into the Holocaust centers,” presumably referring to Nazi death camps.
Nazi Germany did use another gas. Hitler systematically killed millions of people in various death camps, most notably at Auschwitz, where the weapon of choice was Zyklon B, a form of hydrogen cyanide.
Check out the video above.