As Hurricane Dorian bore down on the Carolinas Thursday, flooding the streets of Charleston and grazing the Atlantic Coast, it became painfully evident that the storm would not hit the Gulf Coast region, as Donald Trump had so direly predicted. Forecasters, including Trump’s own weather agency, had been clear on this since last Sunday, but the president nevertheless insisted as late as Wednesday afternoon that there was a “95% chance probability” that “Alabama was going to be hit very hard,” displaying a doctored map that showed the state in the danger zone for good measure.

Incidentally, the weather in Mobile on Thursday was sunny, with a high near the mid-90s. Which, naturally, prompted a face-saving tweet from our fearless leader. “Alabama was going to be hit or grazed, and then Hurricane Dorian took a different path (up along the East Coast),” he tweeted. “The Fake News knows this very well. That’s why they’re the Fake News!”

The tweets are representative of Trump’s method for handling Sharpie-gate, which so far has consisted of obfuscation and doubling down. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” the president replied when asked whether the map in Wednesday’s briefing had been drawn on. (Circling things in Sharpie is a common compulsion of Trump’s.) So far, none of his staffers have commented on said hypothetical map vandalism, though one source familiar with the matter told CNN that the map was altered right before reporters entered the press briefing. Another person in the room described a scenario in which an unnamed official added the Alabama demarcation on a whim:

A White House official told CNN there had been a discussion in the Oval Office before the briefing about what the early models showed and that Dorian could have been worse than initial projections. One of the officials in the room agreed and used a black marker, unprompted, to make the point by extending a line all the way into the southeast region of Alabama, according to the official, who described the situation as “innocuous.”

Even if the whole thing was a snap decision, ABC’s Cecilia Vega pointed out that “it is a federal crime to knowingly issue or publish a false weather forecast.” FEMA and NOAA referred all questions to the White House.

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