Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Tuesday claimed he did not realize that a message he retweeted earlier this month was originally written by a self-described Nazi sympathizer.
On June 12, he retweeted a post by Mark Collett, the former chairman of a far-right British youth political party. Collett wrote, "65% of Italians under the age of 35 now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up..." King retweeted and added, "Europe is waking up...Will America...in time?" The immigration hardliner told CNN he never heard of Collett, and thought he was only retweeting a screenshot of a Breitbart article.
So, since it's just an honest mistake, King's going to apologize and scrub the message from his Twitter account, right? Wrong. He told CNN he's not going to delete anything "because then it'd be like I'm admitting that I did something, now I'm sorry about it. I'm not sorry. I'm human." He added, "I think it's really unjust for anyone to assign the beliefs of someone else because there's a message there among all of that. I mean it's the message, not the messenger."
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