Inquiry Prompted by Trump’s Hurricane Dorian Claim Is Being Blocked, Investigator Says
WASHINGTON The Department of Commerce is preventing the release of an investigations findings into whether it the head of a federal agency into supporting President Trumps erroneous claim that would hit Alabama last year, the departments inspector general said on Wednesday. In a to Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the inspector general, Peggy E. Gustafson, said that staff in his department had thwarted the publication of her report. According to Ms. Gustafsons memo, the department has said portions of that report contain information that cannot be made public, but will not say which ones. The departments refusal to cooperate with the release of the investigation appears to be directly linked to the content of our report and the findings of responsibility of the high-level individuals involved, Ms. Gustafson wrote. She compared the move to the departments vetoing her investigation, a significant statement given that an inspector generals office is designed to conduct inquiries that are independent from the agency being examined. The inspector generals investigation looks at events surrounding Hurricane Dorian, which struck the United States in September. On Sept. 1, wrote on Twitter that Dorian, which was then approaching the East Coast of the United States, would hit Alabama harder than anticipated. A few minutes later, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Ala. which is part of and under the Department of Commerce : Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama. Alabama was not struck by the . Five days later, the office of Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA, issued an calling the Birmingham offices Twitter posting inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time. That unsigned statement turned out to be the result of on Secretary Ross, who oversees NOAA and who threatened to fire the political staff at NOAA, , unless the contradiction of Mr. Trump was addressed. A spokeswoman for Secretary Ross denied that he threatened to fire anyone. In a report last month, NOAA concluded that Dr. Jacobss statement . But that report did not address the actions of Secretary Ross or other officials at the Commerce Department. The inspector generals report would have been a more detailed official account of what led to the statement by NOAAs leadership. The only information that has been released regarding the findings of Ms. Gustafsons investigation is a posted on the inspector generals website, which says the department led a flawed process and required NOAA to issue a statement that did not further NOAAs or NWSs interests, a reference to the National Weather Service. On Thursday, the Department of Commerce sent a response to the inspector general, citing her memo from Wednesday. Your information memo to the Secretary contains overly broad assertions of IG independence and authority, said the response, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. The Department disagrees with those broad assertions and looks forward to discussing those issues in the near future. The inspector generals memo was met with concern from Democrats. It is disturbing that the Department of Commerce appears to be obstructing the Office of Inspector General from releasing its report on an incident surrounding political interference into the communication of Hurricane Dorian forecasts, said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas and chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written about the watchdog system, said she wasnt aware of other departments having blocked an inspector generals report in this way. Richard L. Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, said events described in the memo amounted to uncharted waters and reflected a broader pattern of the Trump administrations actions toward inspectors general at other agencies. The inspectors general are part of a system of ensuring that agencies operate within the law, Mr. Revesz said. Every citizen should actually care about that. In May, the administration fired the inspector general at the State Department, locking him out of his office and his email, and replacing him with an associate of Vice President Mike Pences. Mr. Trump also fired the inspector general of the office of the director of national intelligence, and demoted the acting inspector general for the Defense Department. I think weve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals, the president . focuses on how people, governments and industries try to cope with the effects of global warming. He received a 2018 National Press Foundation award for coverage of the federal government's struggles to deal with flooding.