Sniveling CNN Canadian Kicks Dirt on Trump’s Trips to California, North Carolina

Curtis Houck
January 27th, 2025 12:55 PM

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Twice on Friday, CNN turned to in-house fact-check and Canadian Daniel Dale to spin spoil for FEMA and lambast President Donald Trump targeting the response of the agency to last fall’s aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and this month’s wildfires in southern California.

Dale first popped up in the morning for Pamela Brown’s edition of CNN Newsroom. Brown — the daughter of a late former Kentucky Democrat governor — boasted she had been texting with one of California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s aides as Trump laid waste to how Newsom and other California Democrats have handled the fires.

Dale only offered an esoteric allusion to “a whole host of errors” by California officials “in preparing and responding to these wildfires” and insisted he wasn’t there “to absolve them.”

However, Dale would do just that (click “expand”):

[T]he fact is that whatever happened in Los Angeles has nothing to do with a little fish in northern California like President Trump keeps saying. He keeps saying or suggesting that there was insufficient water in Los Angeles. You know, those dry hydrants we heard about in Pacific Palisades because the state didn’t send enough water down from Northern California to L.A., instead was doing environmental protection, like protecting the delta smelt. I have talked to a bunch of experts in California water policy, complicated stuff, but, on this subject, it’s not complicated. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. If you look at California water data, it’s available online, you will see that there is no shortage of water in the Los Angeles area. What we saw early in the firefighting battle at Pacific Palisades was a local supply issue, a serious issue, no doubt, related to an empty reservoir that had been shut down for repairs and the geography of the terrain. We had water tanks, we had hillsides, we had extreme demand from firefighters, but that issue, the reason the hydrants were dry was not that there was too much water protecting a fish in Northern California, just two entirely separate issues, nothing to do with each other.

Brown turned to FEMA and the strawman claiming Trump’s been “insinuating that under Biden they just basically did nothing.”

Dale rushed to defend Joe Biden’s honor and trumpeted the “more than $300 million in individual assistance so far to North Carolina residents” and any discussion about millions inside FEMA to illegal immigrants should be discussed separately.

The CNN tool even held up the $750 payment as something worth heralding (instead of a drop in the bucket for even a survivor’s immediate needs):

Brown had one more segment of spinning as she brought in an Ashville, North Carolina restauranteur to imply the federal government has been terrific, but it’s really those evil insurance companies that are why so many are still struggling:

The sniveling hack popped up a few hours later on The Lead and started the way he did earlier in the day with a disingenuous caveat: “Jake, the President is totally entitled, of course, to criticize FEMA and today, and in months past, he has delivered some accurate criticism of FEMA.”

Dale then implied Trump was to blame for why some in North Carolina are still struggling to recover:

But he’s also said a lot of things about FEMA and the general federal response to Helene that are just wrong, including a bunch of claims that I think could potentially dissuade Americans who need federal disaster assistance from even applying for it. So, for example, Trump said this month that FEMA is out of money. If you’re thinking of applying for FEMA aid, please know that is not even close to true. FEMA’s disaster relief fund had about $27 billion in it as of two weeks ago. 

If money was so easily available, why are there scenes like this one that NewsNation spotlighted on Thursday?

After relitigating the illegal immigrant funding and doubling down on the $750, Dale huffed that Trump “said repeatedly that FEMA just hasn’t helped North Carolina at all, has been completely absent” even though “it is true that some mountain remote communities did not see federal help for days” and “others argue[d] that housing assistance, other aid has been too slow or inadequate.”

He continued to drone away and gave credence to the political bias at FEMA, but explained it away as a safety issue (click “expand”):

FEMA has certainly been on the ground in the state. As of Trump’s inauguration day this week, FEMA had given North Carolina survivors more than $316 million in cash, and that’s in addition to more than 300 million in aid to governments in the state for infrastructure repairs, debris cleanup and the like. FEMA had deployed more than 1,700 employees to the state as of October, and then Governor Roy Cooper said in December that it was up to 8,500 federal personnel deployed to the state in total under the Biden administration, so I want to emphasize again, I’m not here saying FEMA or the Biden administration was perfect responding to this storm or anything else. And some of what President Trump has claimed did prove to have a valid basis. For example, he alleged political bias by FEMA. Well, it later emerged at least one Florida FEMA employee had directed relief teams not to approach homes with pro-Trump signs. That worker told CNN that skipping those homes was part of FEMA’s avoidance and de-escalation guidance. Regardless, though, Jake, the President, despite that, you know, valid claim, he has gotten a lot of other stuff wrong on the subject of FEMA and federal assistance

To see the relevant CNN transcripts from January 24, click here and here.

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