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DHS Requires Evidence Before Speaking; Please CC Trump!

After failing to get Puerto Rico back on its feet after Hurricane Maria, the Trump Administration has decided to stop issuing public after-action reviews of FEMA’s initial disaster response efforts. The DHS Inspector General has also removed from the FEMA website a dozen positive Obama-era reports that make Obama’s FEMA look better than Trump’s.

Why would DHS take this action?

Acting DHS Inspector General John V. Kelly said the reports, pulled last week from the IG’s web site, didn’t meet proper standards for a government audit.

“We were not confident that the evidence collected (in those reports) was necessary to support the conclusion,” Kelly said in an interview Thursday. “It doesn’t mean the conclusion was wrong (but) our standard is that it has to be adequately supported. You can’t say something without having the evidence even if it’s true” [Ledyard King, “FEMA’s Response to Hurricane Maria Won’t Get Initial Review Under Watchdog Agency’s New Approach,” USA Today, 2018.03.16].

You can’t say something without having the evidence—well! If that’s the Trump Administration’s new policy, more power to them! It will certainly make Trump’s interactions with Prime Minister Trudeau more honest.

3 Comments

  1. O! Good article! Key passage:

    Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is now running for governor, hired Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation to support his claim that illegal votes by non-citizens had swung US elections. But under questioning from ACLU lawyer Dale Ho, von Spakovsky admitted he couldn’t name a single election where votes by non-citizens had decided the outcome.

    Kobach cited Jesse Richman, a professor of political science at Old Dominion University, to defend the charge that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 because of millions of illegal votes. But when Ho asked Richman if illegal votes had provided the margin for Clinton, Richman said “no” [Ari Berman, “Kris Kobach Just Got Humiliated in Federal Court,” Mother Jones, 2018.03.20].

    Illegal votes? Nada.

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