Daniel Lichtman News Today

Cooperate with any investigation that goes on and own up to any mistakes and push forward, and keep going, keep moving on. I want to bring in politico reporter Daniel Lichtman with his new reporting on fema director brock long, Washington Post sr. Political reporter andrew blake. That series of tweets just this morning, tamara, aaron and daniel, not Hurricane Florence, the one currently on the way to the east coast but the one that hit puerto rico, leading to the deaths ultimately and eventually...

A nonstarter as well, right . No doubt. Listen, this is a stalemate that the president is content to ride out unless he gets funding for the border wall and Border Security, he simply just will let this thing play out and see how much pressure he can apply on the democrats. Lets go to twitter. The president is up and tweeting already in 2019. He said this. The democrats much as i suspected, have allocated no money for a new wall. So imaginetive. Without a wall there can be no Border Security. Ou...

At a hotel room. i would wonder why some of those folks are deciding to stay. i dont know if theyre using metal detectors or what, or whats happening, but there they are. >> reporter: theyre trying to -- not quite sure what theyre doing over there. we did speak to them before we came on the air. they preferred not to be interviewed but did tell us they had made a decision to stay here. theyre one of the people who dont think that this storm will be as bad as the local authorities suggest. >> dan...

Here by that point, youre on your own. hallie? >> mariana atensio, thank you for that. >> garret hake is in wilmington, north carolina. >> reporter: we just felt the wind. if you watch the last hour or so, 9:00 we were here and the area in front of me was almost completely dry. now the noose river has started to get out of its banks and start to fill up the street level in front of me. i dont know if you can see how wide our who the is now but when we get into serious storm surge im told the lev...

Facilities and so forth. >> right. >> the president lashing out, blaming democrats for this criticism. study looked at five months after the impact of that storm and has raised the numbers considerably. initially it was a few dozen deaths and now the kind of accepted view at the point we are at right now is that nearly 3,000 lives were affected by the initial wave and then related effects after that. the president pushing back, saying that just didnt happen. surprising tweets from the president,...

>> reporter: and thats a major concern here, hallie. all this rain. feen the winds wont be as intense along the south carolina coast as may have been initially expected, local authorities are warning people they should have already evacuated. those that didnt, they only have a few hours left to make it out of here. south carolinas governor says more than 300,000 people did evacuate the south carolina coast. but right now, this town, this popular beach town with so many visitors every summer, rig...

>> i dont know anything about that. i dont know what to say about that. >> he said this morning, tweet this had morning that the democrats have increased the death toll from six to 12, to 3,000, that its democrats playing politics. >> i dont know. i cant really comment because i dont know anything about it. >> reporter: there you have it. orrin hatch as well saying he doesnt know anything about it. yet another day, hallie, where we are talking about the presidents tweets, not about policies repu...

>> reporter: when these things come ashore at night its a whole different animal, more dangerous, and more difficult for first responders to get out and help people when they need it. to help underscore the point that mariana and these officials made, its under mandatory evacuation order. if you dont need to be here, get out. >> garret haake from new bern, north carolina. mayor of nagshead, north carolina, thank you for being with us. >> good morning, hallie. >> you heard garrett reference those...

We expect an update from the national hurricane center some time in the next 45 minutes or so. but here in washington at the white house, the president, while he is tweeting some about florence, he is also talking about hurricane maria, the storm that slammed puerto rico last year, ultimately killing as many as 3,000 people, according to an independent study. thats at the core of a new presidential tweet storm. kelly odonnell is at the white house for us to talk through that. the head of fema al...

Fema itself didnt after action report discovered that there were deficiencies and that -- say that they are working to address some of the problems that existed, that affected the response to hurricane maria. the white house, on the record, wont dispute those numbers, the death count numbers. when the report came out and the numbers were fixed, sarah sanders put out a statement saying that, you know, they continue to work with the government of puerto rico. she didnt dispute the numbers on the r...