William Safire called it “a passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” Ulysses S. Grant used a version in 1876. Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler used it in 1973, Reagan in his 1987 State of the Union, Bill Clinton in 1997 and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2007.
The political scientist William Schneider named the grammar the “past exonerative” tense. An NPR headline called the phrase “the king of non-apologies.”