Mar 13, 2017

Spicer wrong on jobs number "manipulation" comments

Sean Spicer today said during a White House briefing that OMB director Mick Mulvaney was talking about Obamacare, not the monthly jobs report, when he claimed in a CNN interview that the Obama Administration had "manipulated" data:

I think he was clearly referring to Obamacare. — Sean Spicer

But this is not true. Mulvaney made his comment in direct response to a question from CNN's Jake Tapper about President Trump's statement that the jobs numbers "may have been phony in the past but they it's very real now."

Mulvaney's words: 'We've thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama Administration was manipulating the numbers in terms of the number of people in the workforce to make the unemployment rate... look smaller than it actually was."

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