Republican Virginia Senate nominee Corey Stewart, who has alleged ties to white supremacists, condemned the Rev. Al Sharpton on Sunday for being “a race hustler.”
“You’ve made a career out of dividing people by race, you’ve been a race hustler your entire career,” Corey Stewart said during an interview on Sharpton’s “PoliticsNation” program on MSNBC. “You’ve made a lot of money at it, you haven’t even bothered to pay your taxes at it, and all you do is divide Americans by race. And frankly people are tired of it.”
Sharpton came under scrutiny for unpaid federal and state taxes in 2014 after the New York Times published a story that he and his for-profit business owed more than $4.5 million. But Sharpton, a civil rights activist, pushed back on the accuracy of the amounts reportedly owed. In 1989, he was acquitted of 67 felony counts of tax evasion, larceny, but pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of failure to file state income tax for 1986, according to CNN.
Meanwhile, Stewart has frequently had to defend himself against claims he is a racist given his association with Jason Kessler, the man behind the deadly 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., and the follow-up demonstration taking place in Washington, D.C., this weekend.
Watch the exchange below:
Thanks to @PoliticsNation for having me today to discuss my run for US Senate.
Even though @TheRevAl & @TheDemocrats keep talking about the past I shared my vision for #RebuildingVirginia
LOWER TAXES
STRONG BORDERS
LEGAL IMMIGRATION
JOBS JOBS JOBShttps://t.co/TEvDlNEnZr
— Corey Stewart (@CoreyStewartVA) August 12, 2018
