‘Inconvenient Statistics’: CNN Drops Immediate Fact-Check After Trump Speaks In Front Of Adoring GOP Senators

Former President Donald Trump spoke to the press in the midst of his meetings with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and as soon as he was finished, CNN set the record straight.

As a group of GOP senators admirably gazed at the ex-president, Trump made a variety of false claims, mostly claims he has made before. Before bringing in resident fact-checker Daniel Dale, CNN anchors Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez first corrected Trump on two points: the crime rate and inflation, and then Dale had a few additions of his own:

Keilar: He said a lot there that we do need to fact-check, so we’re going to go through some of it. He talked about crime on the streets. I mean, listen, I think everyone has anecdotal complaints and would like things to… We live in Washington, D.C., I think we would like things to be better here. However, sort of inconvenient statistics for the former president: violent crime dropping by more than 15 percent in the U.S. during the first three months of 2024. This is according to statistics released on Monday by the FBI.

Sanchez: Homicide rates, getting historically low. And interesting for the former president to say that crime was such an issue. He also talked about inflation, “the likes of which nobody has ever seen, never seen levels like this before.” Actually, the inflation rate, the CPI numbers that came out, I believe yesterday or the day before, they had inflation at roughly 3.3 percent. The highest inflation has ever been in the United States was just about 18 percent back in 1917. So two quick fact checks there. The president also talking, interestingly enough, about his “great relationship with everybody here.” And then he paused for a moment and said, “just about everybody here.” Obviously, his relationship with top Republican Mitch McConnell has been fraught over the years since January 6th.

A few moments later, Dale had his corrections plus more details to add to what Sanchez and Keilar mentioned:

So crime stats show that crime is down sharply since the beginning of 2023 and again in the first quarter of 2024. Inflation nowhere near a record high. We did have about a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1 percent. But former President Trump basically never acknowledges that it has since plummeted, as you said, down to 3.3 percent. That is nowhere near, a 40-year high is nowhere near 75-year high, certainly nowhere near the all-time high.

And the other one I want to mention was something he says in pretty much all of his so-called “press conference” remarks like this. He talks about people flooding in across the border from prisons and mental institutions. I have repeatedly tried to get information from his campaign, anything that would corroborate this claim that foreign countries are emptying out prisons and mental institutions to send people here as migrants. They have not been able to corroborate that at all, nor had any of the experts on immigration that I’ve spoken to. So that claim seems to have been conjured by the former president out of thin air. But he he keeps saying it over and over.

Watch the video above via CNN.