WASHINGTON, D.C. — During Friday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t discuss the specifics of conversations between President Donald Trump and White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn regarding a recent interview in which Cohn was harshly critical of the President’s response to violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Can you, has the President spoken to Gary Cohn about his comments? He said uh, the administration can and must do better in condemning hate groups,” asked one reporter.
In the interview with the Financial Times, Cohn condemned the President’s response to the violence in Charlottesville while propping up Antifa protesters as simply “standing up for equality and freedom.”
Sanders said that Trump and Cohn are in “regular contact,” but that she was “not going to get into a deliberation on specific conversations they may have had.”
She drifted away from Cohn’s comments in favor of defending the President’s response to the violent clashes between protesters, including racist groups and Antifa, as well as some who were unrelated to either group and came to protest the potential removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.
“The President’s been very outspoken in his condemnation of racism, of bigotry, of hate in all forms,” said Sanders on Friday. “But I think as long as those things exist, there’s always more that we can do.” She added that the administration and “we all” should look for ways to do more to combat the issues of “racism, bigotry and hate in all forms.”
The next reporter pressed on regarding the Cohn interview: “Was the president aware of the content of Gary Cohn’s interview before it was published?”
Sanders pushed back against the focus on the part of Cohn’s interview that dealt with Charlottesville. “I think everyone wants to focus on a very small part of that interview. Ninety-five percent of that interview was on tax reform, and we’re looking at a very small portion of it.”
Sanders went on to say that she and the President and Cohn have spoken many times and that “Gary has not held back how he feels about the situation. He’s been very open and honest, and so I don’t think that anyone was surprised by the comments.
The New York Times has reported that following the events in Charlottesville and President Trump’s initial response to it, Cohn was under immense pressure from Wall Street associates, friends, and family to resign. The Times report states that Cohn even drafted a letter of resignation.
At one point during the briefing Sanders stated, “I think that the President has called on America to come together, to unite, certainly throughout his comments over the course of the last week, and I think that’s something that we should all step up and be willing to do is come together and look for ways that we can get rid of racism, bigotry, and hate in all forms.”
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