Following White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comparison of Syrian President Bashar Assad and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for Spicer to be fired.
“While Jewish families across America celebrate Passover, the chief spokesman of this White House is downplaying the horror of the Holocaust,” Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday.
“Sean Spicer must be fired, and the President must immediately disavow his spokesman’s statements,” she continued. “Either he is speaking for the President, or the President should have known better than to hire him.”
During his daily press briefing Tuesday, Spicer said that, in contrast to Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons last week, “you had someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
He clarified later in the briefing that Hitler “brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But I’m saying that in the way Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent — into the middle of towns.”
After the briefing, Spicer clarified again, saying in part that he was trying to draw a distinction “of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers.”
