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We now know, thanks to a new New York Times report, that the demand that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) repudiate forecasters who correctly told Alabama residents that they were not in danger from Hurricane Dorian came directly from the White House. It was acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney who called Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to demand the NOAA back Trump's false weather reporting over actual reality. The Washington Post further reports that it was Donald Trump, of course, who "told his staff" that the NOAA "needed to correct" its tweet contradicting his own pulled-out-of-his-ass declaration of where the hurricane would go.
Ross followed up on those demands with apparent gusto, directly threatening to fire the senior NOAA political leadership if they did not publicly repudiate their own forecasters and back Trump.
This—demanding that reports about the path of a dangerous hurricane be tweaked to support the false, momentary ravings of Dear Leader—is just about the most crooked, corrupt, authoritarian, and stupid move any government could attempt, democracy or no. That Ross has not already resigned, now that he has been pinned with the act, is a stain on our nation.
The Commerce Department's inspector general is now looking into the event, and Senate Democrats have written a letter demanding she specifically address whether "Department officials were pressured or explicitly directed by the White House" to "overrule career staff," the "legality" of non-expert Department officials altering "scientific products of communications," and whether "Department officials retaliated or made political decisions that have impacted NOAA's ability to fulfill its mission." This is a somewhat toothless method of suggesting to the inspector general that a "mistakes were made" approach will not work on this one. We already know Ross made the phone call. And we already know the political leadership at NOAA obliged.
That alone is sufficient to haul Ross before Congress to explain himself, and to in fact impeach him and remove him from his post outright.
Lying to the American public about the trajectory of hurricanes should not (and it is difficult to believe it has come to the point where we need to say this) be acceptable behavior for any government official, obsequious incompetent toady or otherwise. It is not even vaguely adjacent to the realm of acceptable. It is right-the-hell-out.
Asking government scientists to mislead the public about the path of a major dangerous storm—asking them to commit fraud, in order to momentarily soothe an incompetent halfwit demagogue's Twitter fee-fees—is itself far beyond the threshold of an impeachable offense. It is true for Ross, and for Trump. We're now at the point where Republican lawmakers are backing Trump administration efforts to lie to the public about hurricane forecasts, clipping the last few strings separating party from cult. Good God. How can anyone in the Capitol live with themselves? How can any pundit, for any paper or network, come to any other conclusion but that the sitting president needs to be removed immediately for instability, for rank incompetence, and for being a clear and present danger to the nation?
