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Officials Feared Trump’s Dorian Response Would Hurt Public Trust

Officials Feared Trump’s Dorian Response Would Hurt Public Trust

(Bloomberg) -- Officials at U.S. weather agencies warned that fallout from the Trump administration’s messaging on Hurricane Dorian in 2019 would politicize scientific agencies and undermine public trust in their information.

“You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science,” Neil Jacobs, then the acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote at the time.

Emails from Jacobs and others were part of a trove released to the Washington Post and Buzzfeed News following a Freedom of Information Act request that sought to look into the White House response to Dorian, the Category Five storm that pummeled the Bahamas in September.

Officials Feared Trump’s Dorian Response Would Hurt Public Trust

The emails in the FOIA release were sent after a Sept. 4 press briefing on the hurricane, in which Trump held up a map from the National Weather Service showing initial projections of Dorian’s track into Florida.

But the map had been changed -- by the president, according to people familiar with the matter -- with a line drawn in black Sharpie that extended the storm’s projected path beyond Florida and into southern Alabama. The episode was dubbed Sharpiegate on social media.

Days earlier, on Sept. 1, Trump tweeted that the approaching storm would “most likely” hit Alabama, an assessment not backed up by government and private weather agencies.

Some 20 minutes after the post, the National Weather Services office in Birmingham corrected the record, stating in a tweet that Dorian wouldn’t feel that effects of Dorian.

Rather than walking back the comment or admitting error, Trump and the White House doubled down, culminating in the hand-altered map shown during the Oval Office briefing. A day later, Trump said on Twitter that Alabama “was going to be hit or grazed” before the storm changed path. “What I said was accurate!” Trump tweeted.

“What concerns me most is that this Administration is eroding the public trust in NOAA for an apparent political recovery from an ill-timed and imprecise comment from the President,” Craig McLean, who served as the agency’s assistant administrator at the time, wrote in an email.

National Weather Service employees are “absolutely reeling,” wrote Tim Galludet, the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, in an another email.

“Employees now fear for their jobs, and are questioning whether they should post potentially life-saving info or check tweets first,” John Murphy, the chief operating officer of the National Weather Service, wrote in an email.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alyza Sebenius in Washington at asebenius@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ros Krasny at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net, Virginia Van Natta

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