‘Again… I Don’t Know How Many Times I’ve Said This’: CNN’s Trump Fact-Checker Seemingly Tiring of Job

Screenshot via CNN.

Fact-checking former President Donald Trump can be a massive undertaking, but it is also one that involves a lot of repetition. CNN’s Daniel Dale acknowledged the crushing ennui of his role Tuesday afternoon as he joined Jake Tapper to fact-check yet another post-trial Trump monologue.

Trump is facing 34 felony counts for falsifying business records regarding alleged hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election — a historic first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The ex-president has made headlines for falling asleep over and over and over. Earlier Tuesday, Judge Juan Merchan fined Trump $9,000 for violating the gag order and required him to delete the offending posts, which he did shortly before the deadline.

As is his habit, after court concluded for the day Tuesday, the ex-president took a moment to stop for the cameras and run through his usual complaints about the trial itself, the charges against him, the judge, the gag order, and on and on.

Tapper took a moment to offer his own complaints about the lack of proper sound equipment in the courthouse lobby, since Trump did seem likely to keep making these end-of-day remarks, and the trial was expected to last weeks. “They’re really not making this easy for the American people to try to understand what exactly is going on,” Tapper said before introducing “our resident fact checker” Dale to “lay down some facts here, spit some hard facts” about “what we just heard from Donald Trump that might not comport with the truth.”

“They might not, yeah,” Dale said drily before commenting that it was “a tradition now” when he covered Trump’s courthouse lobby rants to point out that the ex-president’s claims this was a “Biden trial” or otherwise accusing President Joe Biden of being the mastermind behind his plethora of criminal troubles.

“I come out here and note, correctly, that that’s not true,” said Dale. “It’s completely baseless – again, for the, I don’t know how many times I’ve said this.”

He then went through the key facts that this case was brought by a locally-elected prosecutor and there was “precisely zero evidence that President Biden has had any personal role in bringing the case,” before going through the “laundry list of other claims” Trump made that needed correcting.

Dale also noted that Trump was “simultaneously complaining, like literally almost in the same breath,” that the judge was making the trial “go too fast and also is making it go too slow.”

“It’s not really a fact check but just wanted to note it, Jake,” Dale concluded.

“Well, it’s like saying that President Biden is a doddering, senile old fool who was also at the same time a criminal mastermind operating all of these different trials,” replied Tapper. “I mean, pick a lane.”

“Pick a lane,” Dale agreed.

Watch the clip above via CNN.