WH defends firing, says Trump wants labour bureau to have reliable data

Two days after President Donald Trump fired the top labour official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted on Sunday that the administration was "absolutely not" shooting the messenger on the heels of a poor jobs report.

But Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president's claims that the data had been rigged or manipulated to hurt him politically. Trump cited that justification in his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics(BLS), in a widely rebuked move on Friday."The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable," Hassett told NBC's "Meet the Press," explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be "trusted." In a second appearance, on "Fox News Sunday," Hassett claimed there were "partisan patterns" in the jobless data, and said that "data can't be propaganda." Since McEntarfer's sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Trump's actions threaten to pollute the non-partisan work at BLS to measure the trajectory of economy.