Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) cited the debunked claim Thursday that President Donald Trump had praised neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville in August 2017.
Pelosi was answering a softball question from a reporter about whether the president wanted “payback” for impeachment. After attacking Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday as an “insult,” Pelosi said Trump was “giving encouragement to people to do things” — things such as Charlottesville:
Just as, remember, Charlottesville. People were coming down that hill, with tiki torches, saying, “The Jews will not replace us, The Jews will not replace us,” and what was the president’s statement? “There are good people on both sides.” Really? “The Jews will not replace us’ and ‘good people on both sides”?
In fact, as the transcript of his remarks confirms, President Trump “condemned totally” the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, and used the phrase “fine people” to refer to non-violent protesters who demonstrated both for and against the removal of a Confederate statue from a local park.
Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to use the Charlottesville “fine people hoax,” even after Breitbart News confronted him last year at the Iowa State Fair with the fact that it was simply untrue.
Pelosi also reiterated that the president is “impeached forever,” even after he had been acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday. She also misquoted him as saying that the “Second Amendment [sic] enables me to do whatever I want.” Trump was citing his Article II powers with regard to his authority to hire and fire executive branch officials, not to his power in general.
When asked whether it had been appropriate for her to tear up his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, she defended her actions vehemently, adding that she believed that the president had looked “sedated” when he delivered his speech.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. 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.
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