Citations:mistakes were made

Noun: "(politics) acknowledgment of errors used to avoid assigning guilt"

 * 1997, Congressional Quarterly weekly report: volume 55:
 * Witnesses admitted wrongdoing. With no caveats, no "I can't recalls" — not even a "mistakes were made" — three Buddhist nuns from a California temple confessed on live television Sept. 4 that their organization had illegally reimbursed followers for donations to the Democratic National Committee [...]
 * 1999, Martin Plissner, The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections, Simon and Schuster (2000), ISBN 978-0-684-87141-7, page 96:
 * Koppel then gave a mistakes-were-made explanation worthy of the Clinton White House: “The media do not ordinarily get their information from the same single source, but in the case of election or primary-night data like exit polls, we do, which accounts for why so many of us were wrong.”
 * 2002, Suzanne Brockmann, Into the Night (novel), ISBN 9780804119726, page 213:
 * "Mistakes were made at Tarawa," he told her, choosing his words carefully. "Big mistakes. I'm guessing there were lots of holes in the information given to the officers who planned the invasion. It was . . . well, it was a slaughter."
 * 2008, Suzanne Brockmann, Into the Fire (novel), Ballantine Books, ISBN 978-0-345-50153-0, page 132:
 * “I’m assuming we’re talking now about the Hollywood assignment,” she said, “where . . . mistakes were made?”
 * 2008, James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon, ISBN 9781416948506, p. 8:
 * Mistakes were made. And although there had been a measure of redemption, there were some events that would never be far from their thoughts.
 * , Lisa Scottoline, Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman, St. Martin’s Press (2010), ISBN 978-0-312-64943-2, page 88:
 * We learned in school that he [ Christopher Columbus] sailed the ocean blue and discovered America, but we have learned since that he didn’t find exactly what he was looking for. And of course, as they say, mistakes were made. As a result, there are people, in other cities, who picket the Columbus Day parade.
 * 2010, Maddie Dawson, The Stuff That Never Happened, ISBN 9780307393678, p. 322:
 * Let's just say that mistakes were made. Twenty-eight years and plenty of mistakes were made.