Anti-Biden Ad Misleads on Race Claims

The Committee to Defend the President has been running a six-second Facebook ad targeting older voters in North Carolina that takes former Vice President Joe Biden’s words out of context to brand him as a KKK sympathizer who twice used the “N-word.”

• The ad inaccurately claims that Biden “praised KKK members” — plural — but only cites Biden’s remarks at a memorial service for the late Sen. Robert Byrd, who was a KKK member in the 1940s but later disavowed the group. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and then-President Barack Obama, the first Black president, also spoke at the service.
• It also misleadingly claims Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “But those weren’t Biden’s words. At a Senate hearing in 1985, Biden read into the record an