CNN's John Berman cut off a Republican congressman when he tried to change the subject from Jeffrey Epstein to Barack Obama.
The House Oversight Committee released thousands of emails written by the late sex offender, many of which mention President Donald Trump by name, and the "CNN News Central" host asked Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to comment on the White House response.
"You have been working a long time to get this information released," Berman said. "The White House yesterday held a meeting at the Situation Room with some of the highest officials in the country, with members of your own party to try to get them to vote against the discharge petition, which you're against, too. I want to say, but why do you think the White House is working so hard as you're working to get stuff released? Why is the White House working so hard to keep information from being released?"
Sessions, who serves on the Oversight Committee, suggested the Trump administration was handling the matter the same way as preceding administrations.
"In fairness to the circumstance, I would say probably for the same reason that President Obama's administration, President [Joe] Biden's administration did not release this data," Sessions said. "The information that we get, where it's factually based and comes from official law enforcement about the conclusions that they drew about who was involved, is one matter, to simply take things that are emails and accusations that people make is not a legitimate way for us to approach this. So I assume that just like President Biden and President Obama and their administrative team at the Department of Justice probably concluded that it needed to be done in a different way, I did not ever really approach it. They did not approach it, and we're trying to do that now."
Berman was not persuaded by his explanation and noted one significant difference.
"As far as I know, I will say neither President Obama nor President Biden is mentioned in these trove of documents that have been released so far," Berman said. "Donald Trump is repeatedly."
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