‘That Wasn’t True What You Said’: CNN’s Tapper Presses Jon Ossoff for Claiming Kelly Loeffler Was ‘Campaigning With a Klansman’

CNN’s Jake Tapper grilled Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff over the false attack he leveled at Kelly Loeffler (R) ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections.

In the past week, Ossoff found himself repeatedly taking questions from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, so he used that as an opportunity to appeal directly to the network’s audience. During one of these hits, Ossoff attacked Loeffler for taking a photo with Chester Doles, a neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan member who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Here’s the bottom line, Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman,” Ossoff said at the time.

Loeffler’s campaign has said that the senator did not know who Doles was back then, that she condemns him, and that she would’ve had him removed if she knew. CNN has noted that “this is not, at all, the same as ‘campaigning with a klansman,'” so Tapper had Ossoff answer for this during an interview for State of the Union.

“I’m sure you’ve taken photos with thousands of strangers,” Tapper said. “Isn’t it important for candidates to tell the truth?”

“It is,” Ossoff answered, though he countered that the Doles photo was not an “isolated incident,” and that Loeffler “has been seen campaigning alongside radical white supremacists.”

“I believe they are drawn to her campaign because her campaign has consisted almost entirely of racist attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and on the black church,” Ossoff went on. “The fact that these elements continue to be drawn to her, to support her, to campaign alongside her, and to appear in photos next to her is deeply distressing.”

Ossoff continued his attack on Loeffler and David Perdue, though Tapper emphasized, ‘Just to be clear, she was not campaigning with a klansman. That wasn’t true, what you said.”

Watch above, via CNN.