‘Staggering quantity of wrongness’: CNN fact checker blasts Trump's bizarre fire claims

Donald Trump’s claim that he is being left with “NO MONEY IN FEMA” as President Joe Biden prepares to leave office – and other assertions related to the devastating wildfires in California – were subjected to a thorough fact check by CNN’s Daniel Dale. “It wasn't true then and it's not true now,” Dale said, noting that FEMA officials told him its disaster relief fund has approximately $27 billion as of today. But critically, it was replenished by the disaster relief supplemental bill that President Biden signed in December.” Dale added that while $27 billion might fall short of the amount needed to cover every disaster in the country over the course of the new year – “$27 billion is simply not no money, which is what Trump said yesterday.” CNN’s in-house fact checker also took the president-elect to task over his throwing blame on Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom for his supposed refusal to sign a “water restoration declaration.” Trump claimed in a social media post that the declaration “would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” But no such document “even exists,” Dale said, citing multiple sources including Newsom’s own office. “We've seen those planes, they're there.” Dale added that he showed Trump’s social media post to Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California, and he said, “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,” Dale said.