{"id":20460,"date":"2019-09-10T13:57:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T21:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/wilbur-ross-at-the-center-of-another-political-storm-this-time-about-the-weather\/"},"modified":"2019-09-10T13:57:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T21:57:00","slug":"wilbur-ross-at-the-center-of-another-political-storm-this-time-about-the-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/wilbur-ross-at-the-center-of-another-political-storm-this-time-about-the-weather\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilbur Ross At The Center Of Another Political Storm, This Time About The Weather"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Scott Horsley<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is under the microscope for reportedly pressuring government scientists to back President Trump over a misleading tweet about Hurricane Dorian.<\/p>\n

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Win McNamee\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Win McNamee\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is under the microscope again, amid fresh allegations of meddling with a government scientific agency.<\/p>\n

The latest storm to engulf the secretary began Sept. 1, when weather forecasters in Birmingham, Ala., issued a tweet<\/a> saying Hurricane Dorian posed no threat to their state.<\/p>\n

“We were reacting to the calls that were coming into our office, and people were actually frightened,” said Kevin Laws, science officer for the National Weather Service in Birmingham. “They were wanting to cancel surgeries, and they were wanting to go pick up elderly parents at the coastline because they were genuinely scared. And we felt like we needed to make a statement on where this storm was going to go and to reassure our people.”<\/p>\n

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Laws and his colleagues learned only later what sparked those anxious phone calls: a tweet from President Trump<\/a>, mistakenly including Alabama on a list of states that could be hard hit by the storm.<\/p>\n

For days, Trump stubbornly insisted he was right about the hurricane’s path, giving fodder to late-night comics when he showed off a map that had been clumsily doctored with a Sharpie. But the story took a more serious turn last Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration \u2014 the federal agency that includes the National Weather Service \u2014 issued an unsigned statement defending the president’s tweet and chastising the Birmingham forecasters who contradicted it.<\/p>\n

According to The New York Times<\/a>, NOAA’s statement followed political pressure from the commerce secretary, who oversees the weather agency and threatened to fire NOAA officials if they failed to back up the president.<\/p>\n