The Trump tweet on the unemployment rate caused a stir. Liberals cried that Donald Trump had set a precedent by revealing something about the unemployment numbers before they were officially announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But that’s false. Turns out, Obama did it as well, but not publicly; only to his cronies.
But that’s OK. He’s a democrat.
From EconLog:
It turns out, according to commenter Viking, that President Obama did it also, and not on Twitter where everyone following him on Twitter had the same access, but to a select group of people of his own party. There are two other important differences. First, Obama did it many hours, not just 69 minutes, before the data came out. Second, he gave more information about the data than Trump did.
Here”s the link to the Wall Street Journal story about Obama’s leaks to a favored audience. And because the Journal is gated, here are some highlights:
While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January.