The 81-year-old secretary of Commerce, in Greece on an official trip last September, was awakened from his early-morning slumber by a call from the then-White House chief of staff. It was about the President’s baffling claim on Twitter — made the previous Sunday — that Hurricane Dorian, bound for the east coast, was actually going to hit Alabama.
The first incident in which we learned that the Dumpsterfire’s ego is more important than public safety. The country should have put a stop to his nonsense back then.
Nice to know that the entire machinery of the federal government is being utilized to soothe a reckless President’s fragile ego, instead of serving the American people, but, by now, we’ve become all too familiar with this story.
Um, isn’t altering a federal weather prediction for your own political ends a crime? Yes, it is.
Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.
According to the timeline of events in the report, that statement came together notably without input from career meteorologists at NOAA or the National Weather Service.
Instead, Ross’s chief of staff and actinggeneral counsel, Michael Walsh, worked with then-actingdeputy general counsel David Dewhirst and NOAA’sactingchief Neil Jacobs — who didn’t include other important officials at the organization.
That’s a whole heap of acting there. And it was bad acting at that.