It wasn’t music to his ears.
While promoting his new book “The Enemy of the People” on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Thursday, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta confessed that he wasn’t always in a press pass access war with soon-to-be-departed White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“I will miss her terribly,” Acosta said with a smile before telling the harrowing tale of when he was dragged into singing “The 12 Days of Christmas” with Sanders and former White House communications director Bill Shine.
After a judge ruled in November that the White House must reinstate his White House press credentials, Acosta recalled Sanders and Shine approaching him at the White House Christmas party to ask him to sing “The 12 Days of Christmas” with them.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘OK, wait a minute, we just went through this whole press pass court case and everything,” Acosta said. “We got to about ‘5 golden rings’ and I was like, ‘That’s it, I’m out of here!”
Acosta then agreed with Kimmel on it being “the craziest thing” he’s ever heard and the situation being “almost like a horror movie.”
“I didn’t know if it was ‘Deck the Halls’ or ‘Deck the Correspondent,’ you know?” Acosta said.
HuffPost reported Thursday that despite her recurring beefs with journalists, two White House press corps reporters are set to throw Sanders — who stopped holding press conferences and lobbed “fake news” attacks against reporters — a going away party.
Watch Acosta recall his White House Christmas party memory around the 3:20 mark:
