Brown called out the president for speaking to reporters at FEMA headquarters on Sunday. Brown: Obama spoke too soon

Bush-era FEMA Chairman Michael Brown is standing by his suggestion that President Barack Obama acted too soon to call attention to federal disaster response efforts to Hurricane Sandy.

“In the context of the election, I simply said he should have waited,” Brown told POLITICO Tuesday afternoon. “The storm was still forming, people were debating whether it was going to be as bad as expected, or not, and I noted that the president should have let the governors and mayors deal with the storm until it got closer to hitting the coastal areas along the Washington, D.C.-New York City corridor.”


Brown on Monday called out the president for speaking to reporters at FEMA headquarters on Sunday night, when the bulk of the storm had yet to make landfall. “My guess is, he wants to get ahead of it — he doesn’t want anybody to accuse him of not being on top of it or not paying attention or playing politics in the middle of it,” Brown said in an interview with Westword.

“Brownie,” as President George W. Bush famously called him, resigned from FEMA in September 2005 amid criticism of his handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Brown also compared Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy to his handling of last month’s Benghazi consulate attack that killed four Americans.

“In the political context of being asked about whether [Sandy] would have an impact on the presidential campaign, at some point someone’s going to raise a comparison between how fast you want to get out in front of one story and not another story,” Brown told POLITICO.