‘It Never Stops!’ CNN’s Daniel Dale Knocks Down Wild Claims About Trump and Biden From FBI Director Hearing

CNN’s Daniel Dale knocked down a raft of claims made at a wild hearing that FBI Director Christopher Wray testified at this week.

Wray testified Wednesday at a contentious hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, during which Republicans aggressively questioned him about a variety of issues, including the investigations into former President Donald Trump and other politically-oriented grievances.

On that night’s edition of CNN Primetime, anchor Laura Coates asked Dale to fact-check several of the assertions Republicans made at that hearing, like the popular attack that President Joe Biden is behind Trump’s prosecution:

COATES: What do we need to know?

DALE: Look, this claim has become gospel among Trump allies in Congress and elsewhere. There’s no basis for it. There’s simply no evidence that Joe Biden had any role whatsoever in the decision to prosecute, to charge President Trump in this document case. President Biden says he hasn’t even spoken to his attorney general, Merrick Garland, about it, and there’s no evidence to contradict that claim to-date.

COATES: And one of the things that people are wondering, though, is, is the absence of evidence going to be something that will be coming out in all these hearings and can be confirmed? Because, obviously, part of this is trying to prove a negative, the absence of it there, it’s very hard to be able to prove and guard against that.

DALE: It is. It’s a constant challenge for fact-checkers, and for people more broadly who are interested in the truth. It’s much easier to throw something out there and say, well, we don’t have the facts, so, therefore, he probably was involved and you can’t debunk it. Well, we can’t debunk it, but I think the onus is on the people making dramatic claims to prove it, not the other way around.

Then there was the Ray Epps conspiracy theory:

DALE: So, I’ll start at the end, that is there’s no evidence for this conspiracy theory and Mr. Epps today announced a lawsuit, defamation lawsuit, against Fox News for propagating the conspiracy theories.

The broader point, Laura, is that this conspiracy theory about Mr. Epps is a subset of the broader conspiracy theory that this insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was actually incited not by Donald Trump, who fired people up with lies about the election, not by, say, Fox News that promoted those lies too, but by the FBI under the presidency of Donald Trump for reasons. It’s complicated to follow.

But Mr. Epps, as you said, is an Arizona man. He was seen in videos on January 5th and January 6th, again, urging people to go to the Capitol. He was seen at the site of the first breach. There’s a famous video of him saying something, we can’t hear it, to someone else at the breach. He was on Capitol grounds.

Now, the conspiracy theory is that because he wasn’t arrested, he was probably a fed, he was an undercover FBI, something or other.

There are a lot of holes in this. First of all, again, I think the onus is on people to prove the theory. Second of all, a whole lot of people on Capitol grounds but did not commit violence —

COATES: Weren’t arrested.

DALE: They weren’t arrested. So, Mr. Nehls suggested here that was rare and unusual. It’s not. In fact, it is the norm.

Second of all, in this defamation lawsuit today, Mr. Epps’ lawyer said that they have been informed or they were informed in May by federal authorities that they did plan to pursue criminal charges against him. Now, whether or not that happens, it hasn’t happened yet, but I think that would undercut this claim that they’re giving him special treatment because he was somehow a fed.

COATES: And, of course, that’s being responded to as well. You’re just pretending to have wanted to charge him in some way. It goes on and on.

DALE: It never stops, yes.

Watch above via CNN Primetime.