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‘NEEDS CONTEXT’: CNN’s Daniel Dale Weasels Out of Kamala Fact-Check
CNN’s Senior Reporter Daniel Dale provides a very early glimpse of what Regime Media fact-checking of Vice President Kamala Harris will look like, in the immediate aftermath of her acceptance speech to close out the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Watch as Dale finds ways to weasels out of having to say that Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, uttered a falsehood (click “expand” to view transcript):
WATCH: CNN's Daniel Dale weasels out fact-checking Kamala Harris's acceptance speech by saying that her two demonstrably false claims needed context pic.twitter.com/quAKvXJlmY
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) August 23, 2024
JAKE TAPPER: An historic night here in Chicago. Vice President Kamala Harris capping the Democratic National Convention with a truly historic acceptance speech. Let's bring in CNN Senior Reporter Daniel Dale for a fact check of her remarks. Daniel, what did you find?
DANIEL DALE: Jake, there weren’t a lot of fact-checkable claims tonight, period. But let's look at some comments Vice President Harris made in her big speech. First, this claim about former President Donald Trump and abortion.
KAMALA HARRIS: As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congress. And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national anti abortion coordinator. And force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds.
DALE: This is kind of cleverly flamed- framed, Jake, as a prediction which I cannot definitively fact check, but VP Harris at least left out some important context here. What she did not explain is that Trump has either not taken those positions during this campaign, or explicitly rejected those positions. He has not called for an anti abortion coordinator, he hasn’t called states to report miscarriages and abortions. He has explicitly said he will restrict birth control, he has not taken a clear position on abortion medication, he has said he will not sign a national abortion ban, and he has at least haltingly said he won't enforce an old law called the Comstock Act to ban abortion without Congress. So where is the Vice President getting this stuff? Well, almost all of it is in Project 2025, a conservative think tank’s list of policy proposals for a next Trump term. It’s true, of course, that dozens of former Trump officials were involved in Project 2025, but it is not Trump's own document. Now let's play something Vice President Harris said about the Supreme Court's decision on vice presidential immunity.
HARRIS: Consider. Consider the power he will have, especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guard rails.
DALE: I call- I call this a “needs context” too, Jake. It's fair for Vice President Harris to generally warn that the Supreme Court ruling gave presidents more power, but it did not grant Trump or anyone else total immunity from criminal prosecution. What the Court did say is that they have absolute immunity for acts within their core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for other so-called official acts, but also ruled there is no immunity for unofficial acts. And, so, Trump can theoretically be prosecuted as president or after a future presidency and in fact is still being prosecuted right now, of course. The Court hampered, did not kill, that federal election subversion case that’s still ongoing against him. Jake.
TAPPER: All right, Daniel Dale. Thanks so much.
Dale avoids having to call Harris’s statements on an alleged national abortion a lie by invoking the heretofore unknown Prediction Clause of fact-checking. Dale claims to have been rendered unable to fact-check byHarris’s “cleverly framed” argument, which is absolute nonsense. Having uttered the caveat, Dale then proceeds to fact-check the demonstrably false claim. Just don't call it an actual fact-check.
Dale then moves on to the immunity claim, which he claims to be unable to fact-check due to its “missing context”- before he proceeds to fact-check Harris’s demonstrably false claims made about the Supreme Court’s opinion on immunity.
One only has to imagine what these “fact checks’ would look like were former President Trump the one uttering these claims. There would be no “needs context” or anything else except Trump-deranged catnip for CNN’s viewing audience.
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