Friday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” anchor Wolf Blitzer called President Donald Trump a “chicken” for leaving the White House coronavirus task force briefing without taking questions from the press.

Blitzer said, “Daniel Dale, you’re a fact-checker, and normally we come to you after a briefing like this. This was a 22-minute briefing. Most of the briefing that Dr. Hahn and the vice president were speaking, only a few minutes the President. This is the shortest briefing that there has been so far. You don’t have to be one of the best fact-checker in the world as you are to know what the President said earlier in the day, that he was simply being sarcastic yesterday that was a lie .”

Dale said, “It’s just a lie, Wolf. There is no beating around the bush. You can check the transcript. You can watch the video. It was a lie in two ways. The President said he was being sarcastic. He plainly was not. He said he was addressing this question about injecting disinfectants to reporters when in fact he had been addressing Dr. Birx and Bill Bryan the director of Homeland Security who was present. I think this was notable Wolf because this is the President is willing to lie to Americans about something we all saw on camera less than 24 hours prior.”

He added, “With this President, we get serial lying. And we get lying that is brazen, that is about stuff that we can tell is not true with our own eyes.”

Blitzer said, “This is the first time, it’s only a 22-minute briefing, this is the first time that the President has been afraid to answer questions from reporters. Reporters were all there. They were sitting in the White House briefing room. That’s their job to ask serious, important, tough questions. The President clearly, shall we say, was chicken today. Didn’t want to answer questions that the reporters had prepared.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN