On Thursday morning amid the network recaps of Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate between Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Nikki Haley, NBC’s Today and senior Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake offered a pants-on-fire lie that the two “launch[ed]” repeated attacks on each other’s records and honesty and “barely criticiz[ed]” frontrunner Donald Trump “[d]espite trailing Trump in Iowa and nationally”.
If that’s the case, then why is it that, using CNN’s official transcript of the debate (see here and here), a NewsBusters review and copy/paste of all the times DeSantis and Haley mentioned Trump (without set-up questions from CNN moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper), it came out to over 2,600 words and five full pages as a PDF?
Haake made the claim then played two extremely brief soundbites from DeSantis and…