Former White House press secretary Michael McCurry said on Tuesday night that he believes President Donald Trump has been "more accessible" to the press than former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
McCurry, who served under Clinton, and current White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders participated in a panel discussion hosted by the White House Correspondents' Association and the White House Transition Project on the relationship between the presidency, press and the public.
Martha Kumar, the WHTP director and panel moderator, said that Trump was "speaking regularly" to the press before McCurry cut her off and said that he knew where she was going with her question.
"He is more accessible in doing the exchanges and you are the master of the data on all this. He's probably been more accessible than either Obama or Clinton," McCurry said.
Kumar joked that Clinton was more accessible during his first term before McCurry became the press secretary. She and McCurry then reminisced about Clinton's presidency and how he did interviews at McDonald's and on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial.
Later in the interview, Huckabee Sanders chimed in and talked about how accessible Trump is to the press, adding that he has been held accountable by the press.
"By the definition of the fact that he spends as much time interacting with the press as he does, I think it is hard to argue that he isn't open to answering those questions and being held accountable by the press, so I think that's a very big difference and one of the things that's regularly left out of conversations is how accessible this president is and how often he interacts with the press, but also how often he interacts with the American public in a variety of different ways," she said.