White House press secretary Sarah Sanders denied Monday that President Trump said there were “very fine” Nazis, pushing back on CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s comparison of Trump remarks to those of Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
Acosta asked Sanders to address Trump “saying there are fine people on both sides in Charlottesville, essentially suggesting that there are very fine people in the Nazis.”
Sanders snapped back, “That’s not at all what the president was stating. Not then, not at any point.”
“The president has been incredibly clear and consistently and repeatedly condemned hatred, bigotry, racism in all of its forms, whether it’s in America or anywhere else and to say otherwise is simply untrue,” Sanders said.
The exchange came as reporters asked about Trump’s claim last week that the Democratic Party was anti-Jewish after anti-Israel remarks made by Omar, who is Muslim.
[Read more: Sarah Sanders refuses to say Democrats don’t hate Jews]
“The president has condemned neo-Nazis and called them by name, which is what we are asking Democrats to do when they see the same type of hatred,” Sanders said.
In August 2017, Trump infamously said there were “very fine people” on both sides of protests and counterprotests that had occurred over a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Va.
“You had some very bad people in that group,” he said of those protesting against the removal of the statue. “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of — to them — a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee.”
He indicated that by “fine people,” he was not referring to white supremacists or neo-Nazis.
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups,” he said at the time. “But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
Watch: Trump remarks following Charlottesville violence:
