Gloria Borger of CNN is calling for some understanding to be extended to the Democratic Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, who has been accused of sexual abuse and sexual harassment, saying the senator “is suffering tremendously.”

“I don’t doubt his remorse at all,” she said.

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The photograph of Franken with his fingers splayed, grabbing the chest of former model Leeann Tweeden while she slept, and staring back at the camera, grinning wildly, had been shown on CNN and other news channels several times before Borger spoke up for Franken, trying to minimize the assault.

Related: Al Franken Accused of Forcibly Kissing, Groping Woman

Tweeden had held a press conference shortly before, in which she described her disgust and humiliation at having Franken grab her by the back of the neck and force her to kiss him in 2006 during a rehearsal for a USO show in Afghanistan.

Franken had written the kiss into the act, says Tweeden, and had badgered her to to rehearse the scene privately beforehand. During this rehearsal, he forced himself on her, she said, adding that she’d been planning to pull away.

Franken announced he was running for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota on Jan. 29, 2007, just a few months after he assaulted Leeann Tweeden.

“He mashed his lips against my face and he stuck his tongue in my mouth so fast, and all I can remember is that his lips were really wet and it was slimey,” she said.

She said she pushed him, and almost punched him, and that he later took his revenge on her when she was sleeping on the airplane on the way home, grabbing her breasts and grinning for the camera.

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She said she didn’t know he’d done it until the next day when she was back home and saw the photographs that had been taken.

“I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated,” she said.

Borger attempted to minimize Tweeden’s powerful account, which Tweeden gave without reading from a written statement, and without an attorney or adviser sitting beside her, speaking directly and unabashedly into the microphone.

“I look at this and I look at Franken, and I’m sure he’s remorseful, and I’m sure he’s beating himself up over it, cause he’s in a lot of trouble over this,” said Borger, saying women in her generation just learned to deal with these kinds of things in the workplace.

“I want to just point out about her, which is, she hasn’t recommended any remedies,” she said of Tweeden. “She hasn’t said he oughtta lose his seat. She hasn’t said a thing.”

In opening another segment about Franken on CNN on Thursday afternoon, Baldwin noted that both Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had called for an ethics investigation into Franken’s actions. She turned to Borger, asking, “Can he survive this?”

“It remains to be seen,” said Borger, and then started playing defense for Franken. “We should say that Leeann did not call for him to step down, or say that she thought he oughtta step down … and I think look, we have to look at the context in which all of this is occurring, which is Moore, Judge Moore, and, that has been brewing, percolating, whatever you want to say, for days and days and days.”

She went on to point out that Franken was not a member of Congress at the time of the assault in 2006.

But he was pretty close to being one.

Franken, a former comedy writer and actor who played the self help-loving character Stuart Smalley on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1990s, announced he was running for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota on Jan. 29, 2007, just a few months after he assaulted Tweeden.

Related: Melanie Morgan: Al Franken Harassed Me for Three Days

He was elected in 2008 in a high-profile race in which he challenged Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman. On election night, Coleman was ahead by 700 votes, but strangely, over the course of a recount during which every decision by the state canvassing board seemed to be in Franken’s favor, Franken closed this 700-vote gap, and added votes, with the board certifying him the winner in the end by 225 votes. He was re-elected in 2014, and will be up for re-election again in 2020 if he remains in the Senate.

Borger is CNN’s chief political analyst and a former contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report magazine, which ceased publication in 2010.

At the same time that Borger was defending Franken on television, CNN had posted an article to its website by CNN’s editor-at-large, Chris Cilliza, entitled, “Al Franken’s Absolutely Awful Apology,” saying Franken’s first apology made earlier in the day showed he just doesn’t “get it” and that people should take the second apology with a grain of salt and “be wary of giving him too much credit for a course correction clearly born of a desire to salvage his political career.”