Oliver Darcy's ideological enforcers at Status.com were upset that CNN's persistent "fact checker" of Donald Trump (and almost only Trump) Daniel Dale had not been seen on air in three months. CNN denied that this was a Thing, and then the day after the complaint -- voila! -- there was Dale on Thursday's Jake Tapper show attacking Trump on claims that the Los Angeles vote counting was "rigged."
Tapper acknowledged "Yes, it is true, California and other states are notorious for taking a very long time to count their mail-in ballots, but when asked for evidence to support his claim of election fraud, the president didn't provide any, and maybe just doesn't have any because it doesn't exist."
California's uniquely notorious at slow-walking the vote-counting, but you can't raise any questions about it?
TAPPER: CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale joins us now. Daniel, how exactly is Trump trying to adjust his own conspiracy theory on election integrity to explain how Steve Hilton is on the ballot for the general election?
DALE: So, Jake, President Trump is a seasoned veteran conspiracy theorist, and like many longtime conspiracy theorists, he doesn’t abandon the conspiracy theory when facts emerge to contradict it. What he does is what he’s doing here, and that is expand, modify, tweak the conspiracy theory so that it accommodates the new facts that were — that contradicted the original one.
So, the original one, as he said is that this election in California was rigged against Republicans, it was being rigged against people like Steve Hilton. And then media outlets like CNN projected that Hilton had in fact advanced to the November runoffs. So, the new version of the conspiracy theory is that Trump’s public pressure, these claims that it was going to be rigged, was being rigged against Hilton, put so much, quote, heat on the would-be election riggers that these would-be riggers had to abandon their devious plan.
Farcy Darcy's crew can relax! CNN's Trump Lie Detector (Canada's finest) Daniel Dale returned to TV on the Jake Tapper show to attack the "total nonsense" from Trump that L.A. rigged its vote counting for mayor over six days. Steve Hilton still made the runoff for governor! Well,… pic.twitter.com/WTDQpw2dP2
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) June 12, 2026
Obviously, it's harder to find new mail-in votes to affect the outcome statewide than it looked like in Los Angeles. CNN ran a soundbite of Trump on Hilton, alleging "all of a sudden he was approved. You know why? Because the heat was on. They couldn’t get away with it." Canada's finest Trump-checker then dropped Darcy-delighting bombs:
DALE: All of this is total nonsense. Nobody behind the scene has approved Steve Hilton. All that happened is that the vote count continued. The vote count showed that Mr. Hilton had earned enough votes that media outlets could unofficially project that he had advanced to the runoff. That should be the end, but it isn’t.
And I just want to note, Jake, this is exactly the same playbook that President Trump used 15 years ago, 2011, with his birther conspiracy lies that President Obama was not actually born in the U.S. President Obama eventually released his long form original Hawaii birth certificate showing he was born in a U.S. state.
So, did President Trump abandon the lie then? No, of course not. Instead, he pivoted to a suggestion that birth certificate was a forgery.
Since Dale felt he had to drag in the birther stuff, let's recall that Barack Obama lied a lot about his own life story. As we laid out in our book Collusion, in his dramatically overpraised best-selling memoir Dreams of My Father, Obama lied about his mother's cancer treatment, he made up composite white girlfriends, and he claimed "my grandfather fought in Patton's army" when he didn't, to name a few. But CNN never cared about any of that. Nothing Obama said was ever "total nonsense."
