Asked directly Tuesday if the administration would concede that John Kelly’s comments were offensive to some and historically inaccurate, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “No.” | Alex Wong/Getty Images White House defends Kelly's Civil War comments, calls criticism 'disgraceful' Kelly’s message, Sanders said, was that 'all of our leaders have flaws.'

The White House on Tuesday condemned as “absurd and disgraceful" the blowback to chief of staff John Kelly’s assertion a day earlier that the Civil War was prompted by an inability to compromise.

“I think it is absurd and disgraceful to keep trying to make comments and take them out of context and mean something they simply don’t,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters when she was asked about the criticism of Kelly.


Kelly, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and a retired Marine general, told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War” and praised Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man.”

“And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” Kelly said.

Sanders said Kelly was right. “There are a lot of historians that think that, and there are a lot of different versions of those compromises,” she said. “There’s certainly, I think, some historical documentation that many people — and there’s pretty strong consensus, people from the left, the right, the north and the south — that believed that if some of the individuals engaged had been willing to come to some compromises on different things then it may not have occurred.”

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Kelly’s message, Sanders said, was that “all of our leaders have flaws.” She name-checked past presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy. “That doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history,” she said. “And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that it’s not our history.”

Ingraham’s question to Kelly on Monday involved recent movements to rid towns and cities of monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders, including a Virginia church’s decision to relocate markers honoring Lee and Washington.

Sanders acknowledged that there “are moments that we’re gonna be a lot less proud of than others, but we can’t erase the fact that they happened.” The issue, she said, should be left up to state and local governments.

President Donald Trump previously said President Andrew Jackson was “really angry” about the Civil War. Jackson died 16 years before the war began.

“The Civil War, if you think about it, why?” Trump said in that May interview with conservative writer Salena Zito. “People don’t ask the question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Asked directly Tuesday if the administration would concede that Kelly’s comments were offensive to some and historically inaccurate, Sanders said, “No.”

“Because you don’t like history doesn’t mean that you can erase it and pretend that it didn’t happen, and I think that’s the point that General Kelly was trying to make,” she said. “And to try to create something and push a narrative that simply doesn’t exist is just frankly outrageous and absurd.”

She accused the media of pushing a narrative “that this is some sort of racially charged and divided White House.” She also pointed to a Latino Victory Fund ad portraying GOP Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s supporters as Confederates chasing down minority children in what turns out to be a nightmare. The 60-second spot includes video of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., as the narrator asks, “Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the ‘American Dream?’”

“Frankly, the only people I see stoking political racism right now are the people in the groups that are running ads like the one you saw take place in Virginia earlier this week,” Sanders said. “That’s the type of thing that I think really is a problem.”

