‘A Staggering Quantity of Wrongness’: CNN’s Daniel Dale Dismantles Trump’s False Wildfire Claims

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale addressed a series of prevarications by President-elect Donald Trump regarding the wildfires that broke out in Southern California earlier this week.

At least seven people have been killed, and thousands of structures have been destroyed or damaged as infernos fueled by high winds and drought conditions have ravaged the Los Angeles area. Trump has taken the opportunity to renew his long-running feud with Governor Gavin Newsom and the state of California in general.

Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night, Trump rattled off several falsehoods about the fires and the efforts to contain them. Later, on CNN NewsNight, host Abby Phillip played snippets of the president-elect, who has claimed that Newsom deliberately declined to send water to Southern California from the northern part of the state:

Gavin Newsom had an opportunity to have millions of gallons a week a day, millions and millions of gallons come down from the north. And I was able to get him federal approval from that, from actually from the Department of Commerce, of all departments. I didn’t realize it would go through commerce. I would’ve thought environmental, but it goes through Commerce. I got all of the approvals and he said, “I don’t want to sign it. I don’t want the water.

Phillip turned to Dale and asked, “So, Daniel, can you tell us about what Trump said there? Is it true?”

Dale replied that the president had authored “a staggering quantity of wrongness”:

I showed a social media post from the president-elect yesterday to an expert in California water policy, a man named Jeffrey Mount. He said, Abby, none of it is true. So this has just been a staggering quantity of wrongness from the president-elect in a very short period of time.

And there have been some small specific examples. Like, he keeps saying that Governor Newsom refused to sign a so-called water restoration declaration. In fact, no such declaration even exists, as Newsom’s office has pointed out. He also said yesterday that they’re not using firefighting planes. We’ve seen those planes. They’re there.

But more than that, Abby, I think the president-elect has promoted an overarching false narrative. You heard a bit of it there, that the challenges we’re seeing in the firefighting effort have something to do with a long-running policy battle about how much water should be kept in the north of the state to protect fish species like the delta smelt and other environmental ecosystems, and how much should be sent to the south to help agricultural interests. Farmers in an area called the Central Valley.

Now, two water policy experts in California told me emphatically yesterday, none of this has anything to do with each other. There is simply no connection between the protection of that smelt fish in that estuary in the delta in the north. And what we’re seeing in the south for a number of reasons.

But number one, there is no shortage of water in the Los Angeles area. The reservoirs are at or above historical levels. The water is there. Now, we have seen high-profile issues in one part of the city, Pacific Palisades, where some hydrants were dry or did not have a lot of water. But that was not because there was not enough water in the region. That was because of technical, logistical infrastructure issues related to the hilly mountainous terrain and the location where water tanks have been situated.

So, the idea that not enough water has been sent down from the north and instead has been, you know, protecting a little fish there and that’s why we’re seeing these fires be hard to contain, simply does not bear out at all.

Phillip followed up by asking about Trump claiming that President Joe Biden was leaving office with no funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“What are the facts around that?” she inquired.

“It’s just not true,” Dale responded. “We heard this from Trump after Hurricane Helene in the fall. It wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. Now it is true that FEMA’s disaster relief fund was severely depleted by the number of disasters last year. But critically, Abby, it was replenished by the disaster relief supplemental bill that President Biden signed in December. I spoke to FEMA yesterday. They told me that there is approximately $27 billion today in that disaster relief fund, plus billions of dollars of additional disaster-related funding they have in other pockets of money.”

Watch above via CNN.