CNN's John Berman fact-checked President Donald Trump's justification for firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner.
The president abruptly fired BLS chief Erika McEntarfer last week after the monthly jobs report suggested an economic slowdown, but he stoked baseless conspiracies Tuesday morning in an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box" to defend his decision.
"I just need to play again a little bit of what the president said," Berman said, queuing up a video clip, "because it needs some important context, and by that I mean corrections."
"Listen," the president told CNBC a short time earlier, "before the election, they put out numbers that it was like the country was on fire. It was doing so well, and then they did a revision about two weeks later, and the revision was down by almost 900,000 jobs. You remember that? And I said, man, I said, what would have happened? What would have happened if I lost? Think of it. I would have said they gave phony numbers, and then they revised them a week and a half later."
Berman immediately poured cold water on Trump's claims on "CNN News Central."
"All right, so that was wrong, wrong and wrong," Berman said. "All right, Nov. 1, just before the election, there was a terrible jobs report, just 12,000 jobs added. That was Nov. 1, just days before the election, 12,000 jobs added, Nov. 1 – almost as bad as the two months we just had during the Trump administration, May and June. After the election, the numbers were revised upward, so that's the second wrong. President Trump was wrong that there was a good jobs report before the election, wrong that it was revised upward – it was downward. It was revised upward after the election."
"He's also wrong about the timing of the huge revision," Berman added. "It came last August, where they said that 800,000 fewer jobs had been added in the last year. It wasn't after the election. All of the revisions that were made, in theory, before the election last year may very well have been in Trump's favor – so wrong, wrong and wrong."
Watch the video below or at this link.