The left-leaning fact checking website Snopes acknowledged Saturday that former President Trump never called neo-Nazis "very fine people" during his press conference following the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in 2017.
Critics of Trump have claimed for years that he equated neo-Nazis with counterprotesters following the event. President Biden was chief among those critics, citing the supposed incident as a main reason for launching his 2020 campaign.
"While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be 'condemned totally.' Therefore, we have rated this claim 'False,'" Snopes wrote.
The Snopes fact check now aligns with years of arguments from Trump's camp, who long stated, backed by transcript and video, that his comments were taken out of context. The fact-checker notes that the false claim about Trump's comments "spread like wildfire" on the left, eventually being cited as a cornerstone of Biden's election campaign.
When Biden released his 2020 campaign announcement video, the first words he said in it were "Charlottesville, Virginia."
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"The President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it," Biden claimed in the video. "And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime."
Snopes' ruling removes key ammunition from Biden's arsenal just days before he and Trump are scheduled to meet in their first debate this week.
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The pair will clash in Atlanta in a televised debate hosted by CNN on Thursday.
Biden has secluded himself at Camp David for the weekend to prepare for the debate. Meanwhile, Trump is staying on the campaign trail before heading to Atlanta later this week.
