Tuesday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings With Maria Bartiromo,” Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) said he misspoke when he accused Republicans of being “a party that has the Ku Klux Klan.”
Partial transcript as follows:
SERRANO: Congressman I think there are plenty of Republicans that can learn from Democrats like you about race relations and criminal justice reform, but yesterday on another network you said the Republican party has the Ku Klux Klan. Now, congressman, that’s only not true, but it’s not constructive. Did you say that yesterday?
RANGEL: Well, I probably said it and misspoke. What I really meant was that Trump is saying he was unaware that [David] Duke was connected to the Ku Klux Klan. We know that he was talking and trying to pick up people to support him from that–
SERRANO: You didn’t talk about Trump, you talked about the Republican Party.
RANGEL: There’s no question that I misspoke in saying it was the Klan. But one thing is abundantly clear is that the Klan will be voting for Trump and there’s so many different pieces that Republicans are not proud of that belong to the Democratic– that belong to the Republican Party and let me make it abundantly clear, it wasn’t that long ago that Democrats the same way, felt the same way. we Democrats had the Ku Klux Klan, we had the Dixiecrats and we weren’t proud of it. And so they shifted now from the Democratic Party because of the voting rights act and they vote Republican. I misspoke in that it is not what the party stands for.
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