Donald Trump did a “whole bunch of lying” during a press conference at his New Jersey golf club on Thursday, according to CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.
Many of the falsehoods had been debunked before, but Dale told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer there were two claims he previously hadn’t heard, “both of which are egregiously wrong.”
Trump claimed during remarks to reporters that the state of California allows people to rob stores as long as the thieves take less than $950. “It’s thieves going into stores with calculators calculating how much it is,” he said.
The Republican nominee then claimed it was Vice President Kamala Harris who implemented that rule.
“First of all, shoplifting continues to be illegal in California at any amount,” Dale said. “What actually happened was that in 2014 there was a referendum, a proposition on the ballot, passed by California voters that made it a misdemeanor rather than a felony to steal under $950 worth of goods. But it’s still illegal. It’s still punishable by up to six months in jail.”
“Now, as for the claim that Vice President Harris was the one who did that, in fact, she did not do it,” Dale continued. “She was attorney general, and as attorney general, she said it would be inappropriate for her to even take a public position on this initiative, so she stayed neutral on the matter.”
Dale didn’t dive too deeply into the myriad other false claims from the former president that he summed up as “a whole bunch of nonsense.”