President Joe Biden repeated the claim that former President Donald Trump said there were good people on “both sides” during the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017 despite Snopes recently acknowledging the claim is false.
“I said I wasn’t going to run again until I saw it happen in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Biden said on the CNN debate stage on Thursday night.
“People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches, torches and and singing the same anti-Semitic bile they sang when back in Germany and a young woman got killed I spoke to the mother and they asked him what do you think of those people…and he said I think a fine people on both sides.”
Critics of Trump have claimed for years that he equated neo-Nazis with counterprotesters following the event while conservatives have pushed back and pointed to the transcript where Trump says there were fine people on both sides but clarified that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be “condemned totally.”
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Former President Trump debated President Biden on Thursday night on CNN (Associated Press )
Earlier this week, the left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes acknowledged that Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people” during his press conference on the Charlottesville rally.
“He made up the Charlottesville story, and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place,” Trump fired back at Trump’s claim.
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President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at the Martin Luther King Recreation Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Every anchor has every reasonable actor has debunked it. And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story. He knows that. And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run.”
“It happened,” Biden responded. “All you have to do is listen to what we said at the time.”
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Donald Trump arrives to Trump Tower, Thursday, May 30, 2024 after being found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. (Felipe Ramales for Fox News Digital)
Fox News Digital reached out to the Biden campaign for comment but did not receive a response.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report