WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is calling for "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd to "be FIRED" after the show apologized for taking a clip of comments made by Attorney General William Barr out of context.
On Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC, Todd tossed to a sound bite from an interview Barr did with CBS where he discusses dropping charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
During the clip, a CBS reporter asks Barr, “When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?”
In the shortened clip shown on "Meet the Press," Barr respond by saying, "history's written by the winners, so it largely depends on who's writing the history."
During Sunday's show, Todd then moved on to a discussion of the clip saying he was struck by the "cynicism" in Barr's answer. However, the abbreviated clip leaves out what the show later admitted was "important remarks from the attorney general that we missed."
After the answer "Meet the Press" showed, Barr added that "I think a fair history would say it was a good decision, because it upheld the rule of law."
Earlier in the CBS interview, the attorney general also responded to accusations that he might be doing the president's bidding by saying, "no, I'm doing the law's bidding, I'm doing my duty under the law as I see it."
Twitter erupted in chatter about the segment from various reports, offering up the video clip to show how the portion of it aired.
President Trump sent out a fiery Mother's Day tweet on the day the show aired the clip and called for Todd to be fired saying, "He knew exactly what he was doing." The president tagged the FCC and the agency's chairman Ajit Pai in the tweet.
Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec tweeted she was "very disappointed by the deceptive editing/commentary" and shared out two transcripts comparing the "Meet the Press" segment to a fuller clip of the interview with more context.
NBC's "Meet the Press" responded by writing, "You’re correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error."
In the months after a probe into contacts with Russia by the 2016 Trump political campaign, Trump has frequently said that he believes former national security adviser Michael Flynn was not treated fairly by federal investigators.
Trump has often encouraged his attorney general, Barr, who has openly challenged the decisions of predecessors and launched internal probes to investigate the investigators.
The U.S. Justice Department says the White House didn’t know it was planning to drop its case against Flynn. The action merely underscored the extent to which Attorney General William Barr and Trump have been in sync in their views on the federal Trump-Russia investigation without necessarily needing to communicate directly about it.
As The Hill reports, Democrats including prominent Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have since renewed their calls for Attorney General Barr to resign in the wake of the Department of Justice's decision.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.