‘He’s Entitled to Assert His Innocence’: CNN Fact Checker Daniel Dale Gives Trump a Freebie — Then Digs Into ‘Whole Bunch of Nonsense’
CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale did grant former President Donald Trump a pass on one of his claims during a rambling presser Thursday — but then dug into the “whole bunch of nonsense” he had said.
Anchor Wolf Blitzer brought on Dale to discuss Trump’s remarks, highlighting the former president’s repeated comment, “they want to put me in prison, I did nothing wrong.”
“Does he forget that he’s been convicted of 34 felony charges?” asked Blitzer.
“That’s a fair point,” said Dale, but added that he “personally will stay away from that as a fact-checker,” because “he’s entitled to assert his innocence — but I made a whole list here of other claims that were just flat out wrong, like this was just a whole bunch of nonsense.”
Dale then rattled off a rapid-fire fact check:
He claimed that nobody knows that Vice President Harris’s last name is Harris. Like what are we even doing here? That was the caliber of the claim.
He said, when his crowds in 2016 chanted “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, he said, “easy, easy.” In fact, on some occasions he said “lock her up” himself. On other occasions, he has stood back and allowed those chants to continue. So he wasn’t calming them down.
He said again, you’re allowed to rob a store in California. You’re not, no matter what the amount.
He said he won his civil fraud case, but then a lower court judge ignored an appeals court decision and still penalized him for a large amount of money. He never won that case. He’s grossly mischaracterizing what the appeals court actually said.
He said he did much better in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election than he did in 2016 when he won the state. No, he did worse, he lost it fair and square in 2020. And on that same note, he spoke vaguely of mystery votes in 2020, he claimed were not counted, votes in addition to his actual vote totals. Those votes simply did not exist. His vote total was his vote total. He lost the election fair and square.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
