Fact check: Trump makes more than 20 false claims at news conference

Washington CNN —

Former President Donald Trump held a news conference on Thursday in which he continued to be highly dishonest – again making more than 20 false claims, as he also did in his Monday conversation with Elon Musk.

Many of Trump’s inaccurate Thursday claims have been debunked for years. But some of them were relatively new. At one point, he claimed that his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, was responsible for a California policy he claimed allows people to rob stores.

“They had a recent article, and I didn’t know this, but you’re allowed to rob a store as long as it’s not more than $950. Has everyone ever heard of that? You can rob a store, and you have these thieves going into stores with calculators calculating how much it is. Because if it’s less than $950 they can rob it and not get charged. That was her that did that,” Trump said.

Facts First: This claim is false in two significant ways.

First, theft under $950 remains illegal in California; it is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. It’s certainly true that some misdemeanor cases are never prosecuted, but Trump at the very least left open the impression that the state – and Harris herself – made theft under $950 legal.

Second,Harris was not the person who “did that.” In 2010, the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed a law that increased the dollar threshold to trigger felony grand theft charges from the previous level of $400 to a new level of $950. Then, in 2014, California voters affirmed that $950 threshold (and created a new crime of shoplifting) as part of a referendum, approved with nearly 60% support, that reduced penalties for a variety of non-violent offenses.

Harris did not