The Trump administration declined to provide a guest to ABC News after the leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was fired over a poor jobs report.
On Sunday, This Week host George Stephanopoulos revealed that ABC had contacted the White House after President Donald Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
“After the president fired the head of the BLS on Friday, we invited the White House to provide a guest to respond,” the host explained. “They declined.”
Instead, Stephanopoulos spoke to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about the BLS shakeup.
“I mean, this is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did,” Summers remarked. “I’m surprised that other officials have not responded by resigning themselves, as took place when Richard Nixon fired people lawlessly. This is a preposterous charge.”
“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he continued. “There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number.”
“This is the stuff of — democracy is giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms.”
