Former economic advisors to Former President Barack Obama are fuming Friday because President Donald Trump teased May’s jobs report an hour before its official release.
President Trump tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning,” at 7:21 am EST.
Larry Summer, former director of the National Economic Council, lamented how former President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would have been in hot water had they commented on unreleased figures.
“If during the Clinton or Obama Administrations there had been a statement from @POTUS or anyone senior official in the morning before the Employment Report it would have been a major scandal—with all sorts of investigations following on.”
Austan Goolsbee, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, suggested President Trump’s tweet may have been illegal.
“If the president just tipped that the numbers are good, he broke the law,” Goolsbee said in response the suggestion that Trump was briefed on May’s job figures Thursday evening, later adding the numbers are “classified information.”
Jason Furman, another Obama-era Council of Economic Advisers chairman, responded to Trump’s tweeting, saying, “[I]f this tweet is conveying inside information about a particularly good jobs number you should never get them in advance from the Council of Economic Advisers again.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters that President Trump was briefed on the jobs numbers last night.
The U.S. added 223,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.8 percent, according to Labor Department figures published on Friday.
Black unemployment is 5.9 percent — a new record low down from 6.6 percent the previous month.
“Average hourly earnings increased 2.7 percent from a year earlier, more than projected, while the jobless rate fell to 3.8 percent from 3.9 percent to match April 2000 as the lowest since 1969,” Bloomberg reports.
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