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Trump: 'Before I Make a Statement, I Need the Facts'

August 15, 2017

President Donald Trump took on the media on Tuesday, saying he did not comment on the events over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., where a woman was killed by a white nationalist, until he knew the facts.

Trump spoke in Trump Tower in New York City to discuss his plan for America's infrastructure, but the questions from reporters were instead about Charlottesville and his reaction to the violence there. The press asked Trump why he did not respond to the incident faster.

"It takes a little while to get the facts," Trump said. "You still don't know the facts, and it's a very, very important process to me."

Trump also said he did not want to make a statement just for the sake of making a political statement.

He then pulled out his original remarks from Saturday.

"Before I make a statement, I need the facts," Trump said. "So I don't want to rush into a statement, so making the statement when I made it was excellent."

Trump also took a swipe at the media while defending himself.

"There was no way of making a correct statement that early," Trump said. "I had to see the facts unlike a lot of reporters."

"Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts," he added.

Critics have charged that Trump's initial statement on the Charlottesville violence did not explicitly condemn white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Trump issued another statement on Monday in which he specifically condemned those groups and the Ku Klux Klan.