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In the midst of interviewing government officials responsible for coordinating the federal response to Hurricane Florence, all three broadcast Sunday shows harangued those relief workers with questions about President Trump’s recent comments about Hurricane Maria.
ABC’s This Week kicked off the spectacle with fill-in host and chief White House correspondent Jon Karl badgered Coast Guard Admiral Karl Schultz about what he witnessed in Puerto Rico. Despite admitting that his guest was “intimately involved in that effort” and that the “Coast Guard did a lot of good work down in Puerto Rico”, Karl still scoffed at Trump calling it an “incredible unsung success.” “Is that the way you saw it,” he asked the Admiral.
“I would say, the response to Maria was massive…” Admiral Schultz said in defense of the federal relief effort. “It’s an island which makes it challenging. The supplies lifted in by sea, by air. I’ve got 600 plus Coast Guard men and women that call Puerto Rico home, they work out of there. We leaned in with every bit of energy we could as a federal agency. I saw my FEMA colleagues, other agencies working hard.”
Both CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press had FEMA Administrator Brock Long on and they put him through the wringer over Trump’s comments.
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