Former President Donald Trump accused President Joe Biden of making up “the Charlottesville story,” referring to the 2017 Virginia riot at the site of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that city leaders had decided to remove from a public park.
Biden mentioned the deadly riot as one of the reasons he decided to run for president in 2020.
”He said there were ‘fine people on both sides,’” Biden recalled of Trump’s response to the riot at the time. Trump said the “Charlottesville story” was a hoax.
”You’ll see, it’s been debunked all over the place,” Trump said. “Every reasonable anchor has debunked it.”
White supremacists, neo-Nazi groups and protesters who objected to the removal of the monument clashed with civil rights groups and counter-protesters in downtown Charlottesville. The clash resulted in the death of a woman after a car rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters.
The night before the riot, white supremacist groups voiced their objections to the removal of the monument by carrying torches and spewing racist chants.
“I think there’s blame on both sides,” Trump said in a combative exchange with reporters the day after the riot. “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
This was originally published on our Live Updates page.
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