Spicer: ‘I screwed up’ in comments about inauguration crowd size, Hitler

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Thursday that he “screwed up” sometimes during his widely watched press briefings.

“There were times where I screwed up. There’s no question about,” Spicer told HLN’s S.E. Cupp in an interview set to air on Thursday evening. 

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“The inauguration. You brought it up. I would say that’s first and foremost. There was an event where I was trying to talk about how evil [Bashar] Assad was, and I screwed that up royally,” he said. 

Spicer was referring to a briefing where he confronted reporters on the media’s coverage of the crowd size at President Trump’s inauguration.

He claimed a day after the inauguration that Trump had “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

In an April briefing, Spicer again sparked controversy when he said Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons on his own people during World War II when discussing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical attack on civilians. He later apologized for those remarks.

This is not the first time Spicer has voiced regret over his past comments as press secretary. 

He told The New York Times in September he regretted the exchange with reporters over the inauguration crowd size. 

Spicer stepped down from the White House post in August, calling his service in the Trump administration “the honor of a lifetime.”