PerspectiveTrump Pushed Staff to Deal with NOAA Tweet that Contradicted His Inaccurate Alabama Hurricane Claim, Officials Say
President Trump told his staff that the nation’s leading weather forecasting agency – the National Weather Service (NWS), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — needed to take back a statement NWS made on 1 September, correcting a tweet the president had sent wrongly claiming that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama. Trump’s demand was conveyed by White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department). Ross then threatened to fire the acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs unless NOAA issued a statement backing Trump’s false claim about Alabama, and admonishing the NWS’s scientists for correcting Trump’s wrong and misleading claim. Jacobs issued the statement Trump demanded in an unsigned press release on 6 September (NOAA chief scientist has now launched an investigation of Jacobs’s misleading press release, which was issued without consulting any scientists or meteorologists). Trump, talking with reporters on Wednesday, then falsely asserted that he did not direct NOAA to issue such a statement. “No, I never did that,” he said. “I never did that. It’s a hoax by the media. That’s just fake news.”
President Trump told his staff that the nation’s leading weather forecasting agency needed to correct a statement that contradicted a tweet the president had sent wrongly claiming that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama, senior administration officials said.
Andrew Freedman, Josh Dawsey, Juliet Eilperin, and Jason Samenow write in the Washington Post that that led White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to call Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to tell him to fix the issue, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the issue. Trump had complained for several days that forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contradicted his Sept. 1 Alabama tweet, the officials said.
Mulvaney then called Ross, who was traveling in Greece, and told him that the agency needed to fix things immediately, the officials said. Mulvaney did not instruct Ross to threaten any firings or offer punitive actions. But Ross then called NOAA acting administrator Neil Jacobs, the officials said. That led to an unusual, unsigned statement from NOAA released on Sept. 6 that backed Trump’s false claim about Alabama and admonished the National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Ala., division for speaking “in absolute terms” that there would not be “any” impacts from Dorian in the state. The Weather Service is an arm of NOAA, which is an agency within the Commerce Department. The New York Times first reported some elements of the White House involvement.
Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon that he did not direct NOAA to issue such a statement. “No, I never did that,” he said. “I never did that. It’s a hoax by the media. That’s just fake news.”
