From the NYT:
Two days after President Trump fired the top labor 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 Mr. 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.
…
on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”
It is important to recall that Dr. Hassett both authored Dow 36,000 in 1999, and applied a quadratic specification to predict covid fatalities.