CNN continues to lie to its views in the United States and around the world about what President Donald Trump said about the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
As Breitbart News has explained repeatedly, and as CNN’s own coverage at the time showed, Trump used the phrase “very fine people” to describe non-violent protesters on either side of the debate over a Confederate statue — and specifically excluded the neo-Nazis, whom he “condemned totally.”
Yet for the past several weeks, CNN has reported that Trump was referring to neo-Nazis as “very fine people” in Charlottesville. CNN is now using the Charlottesville lie to implicate Trump in the terror attacks against two mosques in New Zealand on Friday.
On Friday evening, host Don Lemon played a deceptively edited video clip of President Trump’s press conference from Trump Tower on August 15, 2017.
Lemon introduced the clip by saying, “Nobody has forgotten — nobody has forgotten — what he said after that deadly white supremacist riot in Charlottesville.”
He then cut to a clip of Trump saying, “You also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did.”
Lemon left out that Trump had made clear he was not talking about the neo-Nazis: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” He also failed to explain that, as CNN itself reported at the time of the press conference, Trump was referring to people “that were there to protest the taking down, to them, of a very, very important statue and a renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Trump also referred to the murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist as an act of terror — but Lemon left that out as well. Lemon also failed to inform his audience that Trump made a special statement about Charlottesville from the White House the day before, declaring: “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
Several other hosts and guests on CNN repeated the Charlottesville lie on Friday evening and Saturday. It is a lie — something “nobody has forgotten” even though nobody actually witnessed it. Through repetition, and deceptive editing, CNN is determined to turn fake news into truth.
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.
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