Donald Trump says he doesn't know if someone used a Sharpie pen to alter a weather map he held up at a media briefing, making it look like Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama.
The map appears to have been changed - rather crudely - to justify an incorrect tweet the US President sent at the weekend, suggesting the state would "most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated".
Forecasters, including the US National Weather Service, rubbished the claim, prompting a rash of angry tweets from the former reality TV star.
The map Trump held up on Wednesday (local time) showed the National Hurricane Center's August 29 forecast, showing in white the category 5 hurricane's likely path into Florida - except someone had drawn on an appendage, in black, to show it possibly moving into Alabama to the west.
"That was the original chart," Trump said. Asked whether it had been altered, he said he didn't know, the Washington Post reported.
Photographs of the same chart released by the White House itself showed it originally did not have the black appendage.
It's illegal under US federal law to falsify weather reports, punishable by up to 90 days in prison - which is perhaps why Trump has sought to defend the initial claim about Alabama.
"This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama," he wrote in a tweet, with a graph showing potential paths for Dorian - a few of which did indeed touch on Alabama. "I accept the Fake News apologies!"
But that chart was already out of date when Trump sent his tweet, having been generated a couple of days earlier, and did not predict the severity of the storm at all. On the day Trump tweeted it would hit Alabama, updated forecasts showed it would head up the eastern coast of the US - going nowhere near Alabama.
"Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian," the National Weather Service tweeted within minutes of Trump's claims at the weekend.
"We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east."
Perhaps potential rival Marianne Williamson is to thank. The Democratic presidential hopeful sent a tweet on Wednesday (local time) suggesting "two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation" could see "Dorian turn away from land".
She later deleted the tweet, a spokesperson saying it was a "metaphor" that "led to confusion".
Newshub.
