Tuesday on CNN’s “New Day,” host Chris Cuomo said White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comments on Fox News about Confederate monuments were “bigotry being ignored and rationalized.”

“History is history, and there are certain things in history that were not so good and other things that were very, very good,” Kelly said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” host Laura Ingraham. “I will tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Cuomo responded to that by laying out what he saw as Kelly having missed in his remarks.

“He missed the big word, slavery,” he proclaimed. “It was about slavery not a crisis of conscience. What does this show us? Kelly is a respected guy. How he leads men and women, how he has organized, his attention to duty, that’s all true. I’ve checked it ten ways from Sunday. It’s true. But giving him credit for a political modulating ethos is false. It’s always false. The idea that he would control the president’s political instincts to play toward division was always an empty promise.”

“This is the proof. Listen to what he’s saying and listen to where we heard it before, you have heard it come out of the president’s mouth, good people on both sides, a crisis of conscience, think about the monuments in a different way maybe then these people want to take them down. It’s bigotry being ignored and rationalized and Kelly is not going to make it better,” Cuomo added. “He’s making it the same or worse.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN