Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) continues to lie by claiming that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people” in 2017, repeating the false claim on Friday.
Harris tweeted a number of dubious claims, including the “very fine people” hoax:
As Breitbart News and others have explained — and as even CNN, after much pressure, has finally admitted — Trump did not refer to neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “very fine people.” He specifically said he was not referring to them, saying that they should be “condemned totally.” He said he was referring to legitimate, non-violent protesters on either side of the controversy over a removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a public park.
Sen. Harris is among the many Democratic presidential candidates who continue to repeat the Charlottesville hoax, long after it has been thoroughly and publicly debunked. Former vice president Joe Biden also continues to refer to the hoax, and used it to launch his campaign in April.
Harris was among the first of the candidates to use the lie, telling a CNN town hall in January: “We have seen when Charlottesville and a woman was killed, that we’ve had a president who basically said, well, there were equal sides to this.”
Trump specifically condemned the murder of Heather Heyer as an act of domestic “terrorism.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.