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.
FEMA continues to dispel the myth that they don't have any funds to aid Americans in disasters despite Trump repeatedly peddling the inaccurate statement. This particular myth began after hurricanes hit Florida and the east coast this past fall, Dale noted Thursday night.
“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. “Now it is true that FEMA’s disaster relief fund was severely depleted by the number of disasters last year. 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.”
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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.
“He also said yesterday that they're not using firefighting planes,” Dale said of another one of the incoming president's claims. “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.
Several infernos were tearing across southern California and claimed a seventh life Thursday as the unprecedented fire continued to spread into neighborhoods with no signs of slowing.
Watch the clip below or at this link.