NOAA Officials Feared Firings After Trump’s Hurricane Claims, Inspector General Says

The report found White House pressure led to NOAA’s rebuke of forecasters who contradicted Mr. Trump’s inaccurate claim that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama.

WASHINGTON — The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt that his job and the jobs of others would be in jeopardy if the agency did not rebuke forecasters who contradicted President Trump’s inaccurate claim last year about the path of Hurricane Dorian, a government report found.

The inspector general’s report examined the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s insistence that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama, which National Weather Service forecasters in Alabama contradicted. It found a politicized process that investigators described as having “significant flaws” in which late-night demands from White House led to urgent intercontinental telephone calls, text messages and emails that culminated in a controversial NOAA statement criticizing the forecasters.

The inspector general, Peggy E. Gustafson, placed blame largely with top aides to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross Jr., whose agency oversees NOAA, and who were tasked with coordinating the Sept. 6 unsigned statement suggesting that the president was right, and that Alabama forecasters had acted improperly by suggesting otherwise.

She called that statement “contrary to the apolitical mission” of the science agency and described it as “the end result of events triggered by an external demand placed on Secretary Ross — specifically, a request from the White House to, in Secretary Ross’s words, ‘close the gap’ between President Trump’s statement and the NWS Birmingham tweet.”

She did not find “credible evidence” that top Commerce Department officials explicitly threatened to fire Neil Jacobs, then the acting administrator of NOAA. But Dr. Jacobs told investigators that he “definitely felt like our jobs were on the line” if he refused to counter his own weather forecasters.

“At a minimum, miscommunication or a lack of clarity surrounded the key issues of whether anyone’s job was at risk,” the report found.

On Sept. 1, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that Dorian, which was then approaching the East Coast of the United States, would hit states, including Alabama, “harder than anticipated.” Forecasters in the Birmingham, Ala., office of the National Weather Service then contradicted him by assuring the public they were safe. “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian,” they wrote.

On Sept. 4 Mr. Trump appeared in the Oval Office with an altered map of Hurricane Dorian’s path, increasing scrutiny of the president’s insistence that Alabama was in danger and lending the moniker “Sharpiegate” to the episode.

The pressure on Dr. Jacobs and his staff originated with Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who emailed Secretary Ross while in Greece on agency travel the morning of Sept. 5 asking him to look into the discrepancy. Mr. Mulvaney then followed up with an email.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Mulvaney said, “wants either a correction or an explanation or both” for the forecasters’ statement, according to the report.

On Sept. 6 NOAA issued an unsigned statement calling the Birmingham office’s Twitter posting “inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”

In a report last month, NOAA concluded that the statement from Dr. Jacobs’s office violated the agency’s code of conduct. That report did not address the actions of Secretary Ross or other officials at the Commerce Department.

In a series of text message exchanges from Sept. 6 that were included in the report, Michael Walsh, the chief of staff at the Commerce Department, suggested a way to portray the president’s statements about Alabama in a more favorable light.

An earlier forecast, which was out of date by the time of Mr. Trump’s post on Twitter, had shown a small chance that Alabama would experience moderate winds from Dorian. “I wonder whether we build a narrative that validates the early Alabama forecast,” Mr. Walsh wrote to Dr. Jacobs and Julie Roberts, then a senior political staffer at NOAA.

Mr. Walsh proposed that Dr. Jacobs issue a statement, in which Dr. Jacobs would say that he had told Mr. Trump during a briefing on the previous Sunday that “there was a strong possibility that the hurricane would punch through Florida and hit the panhandle including Alabama,” in Mr. Walsh’s proposed language.

Ms. Roberts responded to Mr. Walsh: “We did not tell him Alabama was in play on Sunday.”

In a response included in the report, Mr. Walsh called the report’s conclusions “completely unsupported by any of the evidence.”

“The Inspector General instead selectively quotes from interviews, takes facts out of context, portrays events as related to one another without any evidence establishing a connection, and ignores basic governance structures at the Department of Commerce,” Mr. Walsh wrote.

In a separate response, Sean B. Brebbia, the department’s acting deputy general counsel for the Office of Special Projects, said the report’s lack of formal recommendations “shows that there were no major flaws in the Department’s handling of this situation."

“The Department views this matter as closed,” Mr. Brebbia concluded.

Windthin · July 10, 2020, 12:38am

Kayleigh McEnany has railed against recipients of government assistance — but her parents received $1-2 million in PPP loans: report

dragonfly9 · July 10, 2020, 1:00am

More kneecapping for VOA…

Dozens of foreign nationals working as journalists in the U.S. for Voice of America, the federal government’s international broadcaster, will not have their visas extended once they expire, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

Those people — each with current or past ties to the agency — said the new CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, signaled he will not approve the visa extensions.

U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack dismissed the heads of all its broadcasters when he took office in June.

U.S. Agency for Global Media

“That is horrible,” Matt Armstrong, a former member of the governing board over the agency, told NPR. “Many are likely to face repercussions, some very severe.” (That board, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, no longer exists.)

…

The White House claimed in a formal statement in April that VOA had “amplified Beijing’s propaganda” by running an Associated Press article about COVID-19 policies in China.

Prominent Democrats, including House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Eliot Engel of New York, had warned Pack against politicizing the agency before he took over. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators wrote to Pack to say they would conduct a review of the agency’s funding, citing concerns about the dismissals of the broadcasting chiefs.

The agency’s previous bipartisan board had issued federal rules on June 11 stating with more specificity the firewall and journalistic standards intended to protect the news services’ reports. It now stands as federal policy.

That board, however, was dissolved as Pack took over as CEO.

dragonfly9 · July 10, 2020, 1:04am

Commerce IG cites a damaged NOAA due to President T’s rearranging of the weather facts to include Alabama in the hurricane forecast. Now…what does this IG have to worry about you wonder?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/09/sharpiegate-inspector-general-final-report/

The White House claimed in a formal statement in April that VOA had “amplified Beijing’s propaganda” by running an Associated Press article about COVID-19 policies in China.

Prominent Democrats, including House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Eliot Engel of New York, had warned Pack against politicizing the agency before he took over. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators wrote to Pack to say they would conduct a review of the agency’s funding, citing concerns about the dismissals of the broadcasting chiefs.

The agency’s previous bipartisan board had issued federal rules on June 11 stating with more specificity the firewall and journalistic standards intended to protect the news services’ reports. It now stands as federal policy.

That board, however, was dissolved as Pack took over as CEO.

anon95374541 · July 10, 2020, 2:20am

A post was merged into an existing topic: Coronavirus (Community Thread)

Windthin · July 10, 2020, 3:02am

Pentagon chief confirms he was briefed on intelligence about Russian payments to the Taliban

The Secretary of Defense was briefed on Russian bounty on American soldiers — proving it isn’t the hoax Trump said it was

anon95374541 · July 10, 2020, 5:42am

dragonfly9 · July 12, 2020, 2:15am

Mueller comes out swinging to pinpoint all the wrongdoings that Stone was convicted on, and says that Stone’s felony conviction still stands. While the report did find that there was communication and intent to facilitate the Russian’s interference from the T group, Mueller was not fully cooperated with by T and his campaign staff because there was a huge effort to obstruct the investigation.

We all know Stone did interfere, and he covered up for T. T certainly did know that the Russians were going to dump the DNC emails via Wikileaks, and help T. It is as plain as day.

I still thank Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his service and dedication to the law. We live in a time of corrupted power in the very highest seats of power.

Many people are beyond angry at T 'n co…and want his kind out of office, like now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/11/mueller-stone-oped/?arc404=true

Robert S. Mueller III served as special counsel for the Justice Department from 2017 to 2019.

The work of the special counsel’s office — its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions — should speak for itself. But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.

Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood. By late 2016, the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate. And the FBI knew that the Russians had done just that: Beginning in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian military intelligence officers from the Clinton campaign. Other online personas using false names — fronts for Russian military intelligence — also released Clinton campaign emails.

Following FBI Director James B. Comey’s termination in May 2017, the acting attorney general named me as special counsel and directed the special counsel’s office to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The order specified lines of investigation for us to pursue, including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. One of our cases involved Stone, an official on the campaign until mid-2015 and a supporter of the campaign throughout 2016. Stone became a central figure in our investigation for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers.

We now have a detailed picture of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The special counsel’s office identified two principal operations directed at our election: hacking and dumping Clinton campaign emails, and an online social media campaign to disparage the Democratic candidate. We also identified numerous links between the Russian government and Trump campaign personnel — Stone among them. We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its activities. The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. It also established that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

Uncovering and tracing Russian outreach and interference activities was a complex task. The investigation to understand these activities took two years and substantial effort. Based on our work, eight individuals pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial, and more than two dozen Russian individuals and entities, including senior Russian intelligence officers, were charged with federal crimes.

Congress also investigated and sought information from Stone. A jury later determined he lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress.

The jury ultimately convicted Stone of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.

Russian efforts to interfere in our political system, and the essential question of whether those efforts involved the Trump campaign, required investigation. In that investigation, it was critical for us (and, before us, the FBI) to obtain full and accurate information. Likewise, it was critical for Congress to obtain accurate information from its witnesses. When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts.

We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.

And Wapo - also included their Editorial Board’s Opinion on Trump manipulating the Mueller investigation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/editorial/opinion--the-mueller-report-is-riddled-with-trumps-lies-and-manipulation/2019/04/18/12a46414-3131-45d3-81f6-4c2d62f019fc_video.html

dragonfly9 · July 12, 2020, 2:42am

What’s up with AG Barr’s mention of his not supporting T’s decision of giving clemency to Stone. IF ever there was a WTF moment, it is this little admission or leak from the corrupt AG Barr.

WTF WTF WTF

Windthin · July 12, 2020, 8:29pm

Trump Treasury Secretary Linked To Epstein’s Circle Of Pedophile Friends

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is the 3rd Trump administration member linked to Jeffrey Epstein or his circle

Steven Mnuchin’s Mysterious Link to Creepy Epstein Model Scout

The Treasury secretary’s name shows up on official records for a company formed in the 1980s by Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, the model scout Jean-Luc Brunel.

=================

AG Barr Moves EDNY Prosecutor Richard Donoghue to Main Justice, Installs Top DOJ Official at EDNY

New Friday Night Justice Department Shake-Up Installs Barr Deputy in Brooklyn

=========================

Was Barr’s Marijuana Antitrust Investigation Really Illegal?

dragonfly9 · July 12, 2020, 8:49pm

Follow the money…thread

Trump was seeking to prop up his international golf resorts…which have grown in value hugely. At this point, Deutsche bank said no…who was filling in the gaps and plowing money in?

Donald J. Trump was burning through cash.

It was early 2016, and he was lending tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign and had been spending large sums to expand the Trump Organization’s roster of high-end properties.

To finance his business’s growth, Mr. Trump turned to a longtime ally, Deutsche Bank, one of the few banks still willing to lend money to the man who has called himself “The King of Debt.”

Mr. Trump’s loan request, which has not been previously reported, set off a fight that reached the top of the German bank, according to three people familiar with the request. In the end, Deutsche Bank did something unexpected. It said no.

Senior officials at the bank, including its future chief executive, believed that Mr. Trump’s divisive candidacy made such a loan too risky, the people said. Among their concerns was that if Mr. Trump won the election and then defaulted, Deutsche Bank would have to choose between not collecting on the debt or seizing the assets of the president of the United States.

Two of the people familiar with the loan request said the Trump Organization had been seeking to borrow against its Miami resort to pay for work on a golf property in Turnberry, Scotland.

A Trump Organization spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, denied that the company had needed outside funding for Turnberry.

Windthin · July 12, 2020, 8:54pm

I remember this, and have a thread about it. They’ve never determined where he got the money, but he was paying for stuff in cash where previously he’d always been known as the king of credit, and golf courses like that are often sieves for money, leaking left and right.

dragonfly9 · July 12, 2020, 8:56pm

Yes, it’s been going on for a while…

But there is this (in)famous quote from Eric Trump

dragonfly9 · July 12, 2020, 9:00pm

Details from within Adam Davidson’s thread.

anon95374541 · July 13, 2020, 5:03pm

Judge seeks more details on Trump’s clemency for Roger Stone

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered that the parties provide her by Tuesday with a copy of the executive order that commuted Stone’s sentence. She also asked for clarity about the scope of the clemency, including whether it covers just his prison sentence or also the two-year period of supervised release that was part of his sentence.

Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence on Friday evening, just days before he was to report to prison. Stone was convicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation with making false statements, tampering with a witness and obstructing lawmakers who were examining Russian interference in the 2016 election.

dragonfly9 · July 14, 2020, 9:37pm

President’s press conference now swerves into a campaign speech and he rails against Biden.

He comes out about being in favor of a democratic Hong Kong.

Both CNN/MSNBC have turned off their coverage. Unless they get to reporter’s questions then these networks will stay away.

dragonfly9 · July 15, 2020, 1:54pm

dragonfly9 · July 15, 2020, 3:50pm

The effort came less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Manhattan district attorney to demand the records.

Days after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a defeat to President Trump, clearing the way for the Manhattan district attorney to seek his tax returns, his lawyers on Wednesday renewed their efforts to block or at least narrow access to the records.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote to the federal judge in Manhattan who originally presided over the case, saying they plan to argue that district attorney’s subpoena was too broad and politically motivated.

The president and the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, have been locked in a battle over the records for almost a year.

The district attorney issued the subpoena to the president’s accounting firm in August 2019, seeking eight years of his corporate and personal tax returns as part of an investigation into hush-money payments made to an adult film actress who said she had had an affair with Mr. Trump. The president has denied the affair.

Mr. Trump fought the request for his financial records, arguing that a sitting president was immune from a state criminal investigation.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected his argument by a 7-to-2 vote, but it left open the possibility that he could raise new objections to Mr. Vance’s subpoena in the lower court.

Windthin · July 15, 2020, 4:05pm

Kansas Republican Rep. Steve Watkins charged with voter fraud

Watkins’ father is under investigation by Federal Election Commission probe as well.

Representative Steve Watkins, Republican of Kansas, was charged with 3 felonies related to voter fraud shortly before he appeared in a televised debate ahead of the state’s primary election.

WTF Community

More Questionable Behavior from Trump, T Admin, DOJ, and R's vs Dems, Press, Justice