White House Press Secretary "Unmoored from Reality" Says Westchester-Rockland Congresswoman

WHITE PLAINS, NY – Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey suggested Tuesday that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer could be "completely unmoored from reality" after his comments and subsequent clarifications about Syria, Hitler and the Holocaust. She also found it objectionable that he made the remarks during Passover.

Spicer delivered a televised briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon, with discussions continuing to focus on Syria's chemical attacks. In his comments, he mistakenly said that Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons.

So how did Hitler even come up? When Spicer was asked whether the administration believes that Russia had foreknowledge of Syria's chemical attacks, he said simply that there's no consensus in the intelligence community on this point yet. He said that it is very important to enforce the agreement that was made under the Obama administration to dismantle Assad's chemical weapons capacity.

But he added that Russia is likely to be isolated in its support of Assad, given the horror of the regime's use of chemical weapons. (For more information on this and other political stories, subscribe to the White House Patchfor daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

"You had someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons," Spicer said.

When pressed, he tried to clarify.

"He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing," Spicer added. "He brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But [not] in the way that Bashar al-Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down, into the middle of towns."

Since many German people were brought to concentration camps and killed, many people found this clarification also perplexing, and many found it morally offensive. The phrase "Holocaust centers" was also a puzzling choice of words.

Lowey, (D-Rockland/Westchester), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, released this statement:

It is deeply disturbing that the President’s chief spokesman has either a cavalier aversion to facts, is completely unmoored from reality, or both.

Instead of articulating a clear, comprehensive strategy toward Syria, Sean Spicer chose the first day of Passover to repeatedly downplay the horrors of the Holocaust.

Mr. Spicer’s lack of credibility renders his multiple clarifications meaningless. He must apologize and resign immediately.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

By Cody Fenwick and Lanning Taliaferro