Daniel Dale Hits CNN to Fact-Check Trump — Hours After Damning Report on His 3-Month Absence

CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale hit the airwaves to fact-check President Donald Trump for the first time in over three months — less than 24 hours after a damning report on his absence.

It was about 2 weeks ago when the observation that Dale hadn’t been on the air to fact-check Trump for 3 months surfaced, and CNN wouldn’t say why. Then on Wednesday night, Natalie Korach, media correspondent for Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, dropped some reporting that built on that story, entitled “The Curious Disappearance of Daniel Dale.”

Korach noted speculation about the absence in the context of Paramount’s planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.

This time, CNN issued a statement that they also provided to Mediaite’s Sarah Rumpf:

There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the President are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.

Dale was back on the air the next afternoon — on Thursday’s edition of CNN’s The Lead — and anchor Jake Tapper even noted the long absence as he thanked Dale, telling him “Good to see you again”:

TAPPER: CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale joins us now. Daniel, how exactly is Trump trying to adjust his own conspiracy theory on election integrity to explain how Steve Hilton is on the ballot for the general election?

DALE: So, Jake, President Trump is a seasoned veteran conspiracy theorist, and like many longtime conspiracy theorists, he doesn’t abandon the conspiracy theory when facts emerge to contradict it. What he does is what he’s doing here, and that is expand, modify, tweak the conspiracy theory so that it accommodates the new facts that were — that contradicted the original one.

So, the original one, as he said is that this election in California was rigged against Republicans, it was being rigged against people like Steve Hilton. And then media outlets like CNN projected that Hilton had in fact advanced to the November runoffs. So, the new version of the conspiracy theory is that Trump’s public pressure, these claims that it was going to be rigged, was being rigged against Hilton, put so much, quote, heat on the would-be election riggers that these would-be riggers had to abandon their devious plan.

So, listen to what the president said today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It was a week, and it was heading south, and I started saying it’s a rigged election. And then they said it was going to take two weeks, one week, two weeks, and all of a sudden he was approved. You know why? Because the heat was on. They couldn’t get away with it. If I didn’t do it, I guarantee he wouldn’t be the nominee. It’s a rigged election.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DALE: All of this is total nonsense. Nobody behind the scene has approved Steve Hilton. All that happened is that the vote count continued. The vote count showed that Mr. Hilton had earned enough votes that media outlets could unofficially project that he had advanced to the runoff. That should be the end, but it isn’t.

And I just want to note, Jake, this is exactly the same playbook that President Trump used 15 years ago, 2011, with his birther conspiracy lies that President Obama was not actually born in the U.S. President Obama eventually released his long form original Hawaii birth certificate showing he was born in a U.S. state.

So, did President Trump abandon the lie then? No, of course not. Instead, he pivoted to a suggestion that birth certificate was a forgery.

TAPPER: Daniel Dale, thanks so much. Good to see you again.

Watch above via CNN’s The Lead.

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