Biden doubles down on 'fine people' narrative during debate despite Snopes fact-check

President Joe Biden on Thursday claimed that former President Donald Trump had referred to Nazis and radical demonstrators at the 2017 Charlottesville rally as "fine people," repeating a longstanding narrative just days after left-leaning fact-checker Snopes debunked the claim.

"I said I wasn't going to run again until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torture and and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang when back in Germany," Biden said. "They asked [Trump], they said, 'What? What do you think of those people'... He said, 'I think there's fine people on both sides.'"

Trump explicitly stated in his remarks that neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be "condemned totally."

"Jake, both of you know that story has been totally when you see the sentence, it said 100% exoneration on that," Trump said. "So he just keeps it going... He didn't run because of Charlottesville. He ran because it was his last chance."

"He made up the Charlottesville story, and you'll see it's debunked, all over," he went on. "Every anchor has ... every reasonable actor has debunked it, and just the other day it came out, where it was fully debunked. It's a nonsense story, he knows that, and he didn't run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run."