GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has taken some flack recently for not explicitly disavowing former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke during a recent interview in which the real estate mogul was told that Duke had made some favorable remarks about the presidential hopeful. Trump has, in fact, disavowed David Duke in the past, saying in an August 2015 interview that he "certainly wouldn’t want [Duke's] endorsement" and explicitly disavowing the former Klan member.
That being said, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton is actually on the record praising an ex-Klan member.
The last living member of the U.S. Senate to have been a card carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan was West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd. In the 1940s Byrd organized a local Klan chapter, attaining the rank of "exalted cyclops" in the racist organization. In the same decade, Byrd wrote to a segregationist Mississippi Senator and proclaimed:
I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
In 1964 Senator Byrd took part in what was, at the time, the longest filibuster in U.S. history, against the Civil Rights Act.
Upon Senator Byrd's death in 2010, Clinton heaped praise upon the ex-Klansman, calling him a "friend and mentor."
"Senator Byrd was a man of surpassing eloquence and nobility," then-Secretary of State Clinton said in the 2010 video. "It is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd. He was not only its longest serving member. He was its heart, its soul, and it's historian."
h/t Daily Caller
Watch Hillary Clinton praise former Klansman, Senator Robert Byrd:
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