CNN’s Daniel Dale Busts Vivek Ramaswamy On Multiple Trump Criticism Walkbacks
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale busted Vivek Ramaswamy over several recent attempts to explain away criticisms he’s made of ex-President Donald Trump in the past.
Ramaswamy has been through the wringer this week after a knock-down-drag-out interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan in which he was challenged on a number of issues — including a brutal exchange in which Ramaswamy struggled to explain why he had called Trump’s behavior “downright abhorrent” shortly after Jan. 6.
On Friday night’s edition of CNN Primetime, Dale joined anchor Abby Phillip, who noted Ramaswamy “has CNN’s fact checker working overtime” and asked Dale to debunk a “pattern” of falsehoods about his past criticism of Trump:
PHILLIP: Vivek Ramaswamy, the presidential candidate has CNN’s fact checker working overtime. Daniel Dale is here to save us.
Daniel, Ramaswamy has a pattern of inaccurately describing his own stances before he started running for president.
Jonah just alluded to this in just a few minutes ago. What have you learned?
DANIEL DALE: Yes. I’ve counted three times he’s done this in the last three weeks alone, each time, Abby, while trying to distance himself from past criticism of Donald Trump. Listen to the latest this week from an interview with MSNBC.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MEHDI HASAN: You say he behaved downright abhorrent behavior that makes him a danger to democracy. What was downright abhorrent?
RAMASWAMY: Let’s actually be really fair to your audience. So, on January 10th, 2021, there in the ballots, days after that incident, I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that censorship was the real cause of what happened on January 6th. When asked in response, somebody asked me the question — that’s what I wrote, I’m giving you the facts of what I said. That was published in The Wall Street Journal.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DALE: So, I asked his campaign which Wall Street Journal op-ed he was talking about. They sent me the link. I read the op-ed. It does not include any argument about January 6th like the one he claimed on MSNBC he had included. You might say, okay, he forgot what he wrote two years ago but this is, again, a pattern during the first Republican debate two weeks ago, he made two false claims about what was in his own year-old book. He falsely deny that it was more critical about Trump than he was in that glowing debate. He — and then in an interview on NBC, on Meet the Press, he was asked about that book’s criticism of Trump’s stolen election lies, and he said, no, no, in the same chapter of that book, I included tons of material, had about 20 pages of an argument that big tech had interfered in that very same election.
While I went and read the book, read the chapter, nothing in there at all in the entire book, let alone the chapter, and that’s all, in addition, Abby, to him falsely claiming he was misquoted by The Atlantic Magazine recently. He made some controversial comments about 9/11. He said, oh, no, no, they got that wrong. They put words in my mouth. Well, The Atlantic soon released audio proving that he had been quoted correctly. So, certainly a pattern at this point.
Watch above via CNN Primetime.
