Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts provided an in-depth explanation from the North Lawn of the White House about the recent saga dubbed “Sharpiegate.”
The day before, Trump was discussing Hurricane Dorian with reporters in the Oval Office, when he produced a map of its trajectory. The map though, appeared to be altered with a black Sharpie marker. The addition to the graphic coincides with the president’s claim that the hurricane could hit the southern part of Alabama. Trump tweeted Alabama was still in the storm’s path, despite the availability of contradictory information.
This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies! pic.twitter.com/0uCT0Qvyo6
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2019
“A bit of a controversy has erupted over this, because at his hurricane briefing yesterday the president held up a graphic of a five-day warning cone from last Friday the 30th which appeared to have been modified with a Sharpie to extend the bubble out there, as you can see, to include the Florida panhandle and parts of southern Alabama,” Roberts explained. “The president also tweeted out a graphic of hurricane model plots collected by the South Florida Water Management District to prove that Alabama was at risk and some of those tracks did come very close to the eastern part of Alabama. But those spaghetti models were from Thursday, August the 28th.”
He continued, “By the time the president tweeted about Alabama at 10:51 a.m. on Sunday, the forecast track had moved well east,” he added, while also noting that a Sunday morning forecast showed “Dorian would stay well-off shore and well away from Alabama.”
The White House correspondent went on to bring up some people who have claimed that “by altering an official forecast map, the president broke a federal law.”
Since the hurricane made landfall days ago, the president has maintained that his claims were accurate on multiple occasions, while outlets have continued to cover the president’s refusal to concede.
